
Class Ji^^ii/ 



Book 



ilV_ 



COP^-RIGHT DEPOSIT. 



LETTERS 
TO SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHERS 



LETTERS 

TO 

SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHERS 



ON THE GREAT TRUTHS 
OF OUR CHRISTIAN FAITH 



BY 

HENRY CHURCHILL KING 

President of Oberlin College 



BOSTON 
THE PILGRIM PRESS 

NEW YORK — CHICAGO 
1906 



fWl^ 



> 



UBRARVofCONGRtSS 
OntCoDy fwcfivf'd 

JUL 19 J906 

Cotrynrnt £ntry 
ASS a XU. No, 



*tv 



I \ 



Copyright^ igo6 

By The Congregational Sunday-School 

AND Publishing Society 



Reprinted from The Pilgrim Teacher and 
Sunday School Outlook 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



CONTENTS 

LEITER ONE page 

Some Underlying Principles i 

LETTER TWO 
The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual 
Life 17 

LETTER THREE 
The Significance of Jesus Christ ... 35 

LETl^ER FOUR 
God Manifest in Christ 55 

LETTER FIVE 

Men in the Light of Christ . . . . 67 

LETTER SIX 
The Christian Life as a Friendship . . 81 

LETIER SEVEN 

The Basis in the Divine Friendship . . 97 

[v] 



CONTENTS 



LETTER EIGHT page 
The Conditions of Deepening Acquaint- 
ance WITH God i^^ 

LETTER NINE 

The Conditions of Deepening Acquaint- 
ance with God — Continued. . . . 127 

LETTER TEN 
The Conditions of Deepening Acquaint- 
ance with God — Continued. . . • i43 

LETTER ELEVEN 

The Fundamental Temptations . . . i59 

LETTER TWELVE 

The Supreme Claims of the Christian 
Life upon Thoughtful Men . . . . i77 



[vi] 



LETTER I 

SOME UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES 



Letters to Sunday-school 
Teachers 

h,etter One 

SOME UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES 

1 WRITE especially to the younger 
teachers ; and I want in these 
letters simply to try to say to you 
some of those things that I should 
like to say if I could sit down with 
you individually and we were to talk 
frankly and earnestly of your deeper 
difficulties, of those questions which, 
after all, actually concern us more 
than all else. I am not to aim at say- 
ing novel things; but we are to try 
to find our way together, as I have 

[3] 



LETTERS 



repeatedly said to my own Sunday 
Bible Class, into clear and deep 
and abiding convictions concerning 
the great fundamental Christian 
truths; to see that they are — and 
I do not choose my words here at 
random — real, rational, vital. Real 
— as real as business and housework 
and books and music and friends 
and home ; rational — as knit up in- 
dissolubly with your best thinking 
in every other sphere ; vital — as 
springing out of your own life, lay- 
ing commands on life, adding zest 
to life, and giving great, undying 
motives for life. You cannot finally 
be satisfied with less. 

If these great fundamental Chris- 
tian truths come to mean to you 
what Christ intended they should 
mean, they will help you to do the 
two only really great things one 
[4] 



TO TEACHERS 



man can do for another : to bring 
to your pupils the contagion of a 
high and noble life, and to bear 
honest, effective testimony of your 
own best vision — that in which 
and by which you most live. This 
is a large undertaking ; and if it is at 
the end in any fair measure accom- 
plished, you must do even more in the 
matter than I, You must do some 
earnest thinking ; and, even more 
than that, you must furnish that 
deepening experience, through the 
truth wrought out, that can alone 
lead you still more deeply into the 
truth. Simply to replace old phrases 
by new phrases is poor and futile 
business enough, and not worth the 
time of either you or me. And 
this leads me at once to the first 
of those preliminary things, those 
underlying principles, of which I 
[5] 



LETTERS 



wanted to speak briefly in this first 
letter. 

I . No one can simply hand over to 
you a ready-made creed, however clear 
and convincing his reasoning, how- 
ever just and comprehensive his 
view, because, in the first place, if 
your creed is to be worth anything, 
it must be in truth what we call it, 
a confession of faith — something in 
which you can honestly express your 
own belief; something that grows in 
some vital way out of your own ex- 
perience ; in a word, a true putting 
of real convictions. Now convic- 
tions cannot be handed over from 
man to man. No man can ever be 
sure of absolutely transferring his 
full thought, even, to another mind ; 
still less can convictions be so easily 
handed over. The most I can pos- 
sibly do for any of you is simply to 
[6] 



TO TEACHERS 



tell you honestly the truths that 
mean most to me, the surpassing 
significance that Christ seems to me 
to have, and how these deepest 
things best come home to me. 
The rest is for you and God. If by 
time and thought and attention and 
personal commitment you give God 
opportunity with you through the 
truth and through his supreme reve- 
lation in Christ, the certainty of 
God and the truth of God shall be 
wrought in you. So and only so 
can come real convictions. It is 
serious business, therefore, upon 
which we enter together in these 
apparently simple letters. The 
great Christian convictions cannot 
be simply laid on you like so many 
garments, or even so many geomet- 
rical proofs or scientific propositions. 
These spiritual convictions are deeply 

[7] 



LETTERS 



connected with your inner spirit and 
life, and they involve your personal 
relation to God. We greatly de- 
grade Christian doctrine when we 
regard it as simply a series of more 
or less provable propositions. Your 
real inner creed is a vital growth 
out of your personal experience. 

2. Tou cannot come in any way into 
any deep convictions of the truth all at 
once. This is not at all to say that 
there may not be significant crises 
in your lives. I could even hope 
that some of these letters might 
bring such a significant crisis for 
some of you. But even our deepest 
and most striking experiences have 
been long preparing, and their full 
significance comes out only as we 
try to live by them. Mighty con- 
victions are no growth of an hour 
or a day ; they root deep in living, 
[8] 



TO TEACHERS 



in the influence of close personal 
associations, in honest putting of the 
truth into act. You will not there- 
fore expect in this most difficult 
sphere of moral and spiritual con- 
victions, that you can make some 
happy leap that shall land you at 
once in the center of all truth. We 
are coming to believe that no truth, 
of whatever kind, gets real hold of 
us so. Even mathematical truths 
we need to work out in multiplied 
problems ; and for appreciation of 
scientific truth we require the work 
in the laboratory. How much more 
must the appreciation of these vital 
truths come out only as they are put 
into act ! The creed that is to be 
deeply yours, you must have lived out, 
not merely thought out. The full 
significance, therefore, of some of 
the things I shall say may come to 

[9] , 



LETTERS 



you only after the months and years 
have given you the vital experience 
that unlocks for you the inner secrets 
of the truth. It is one of the joys 
of living, that one may look forward 
to ever-deepening vision of the truth 
through simple, honest living. *' If 
any man willeth to do his will, he 
shall know of the teaching.'' And 
you are seeking truth, not simply for 
yourselves, but as teachers of others, 
so that you need to see that — 

3. No one can teach in the moral 
and spiritual realm with greatest 
effectiveness that which he does not 
himself believe with depth of convic- 
tion. You cannot kindle another by 
rote. That which does not greatly 
move you will scarcely greatly move 
another through you. This simply 
means that our effective teaching is 
necessarily confined to what is vitally 
[10] 



TO TEACHERS 



real to us — to our real inner creed. 
For just this reason " complete and 
systematic '' presentation of religious 
subjects often contains much that is 
mere filling. Only those parts have 
any kindling power that have the 
fire of personal conviction in them. 
We must learn, as teachers, not to 
be afraid of even very fragmentary 
teaching, if that is all we can make 
real. Even fragments that are real 
are better than masses that are unreal ; 
but we want the fullest reality pos- 
sible. For the very sake, therefore, 
of both the breadth and the effective- 
ness of one's teaching, one must seek 
to deepen and to extend his convic- 
tions ; for there is no cheap way to 
become a good teacher of spiritual 
things. The ultimate aim, then, of 
this effort we are to make together 
is absolutely vital to any true success 



LETTERS 



in the high work of the Sunday- 
school teacher. I am to try, with 
your own cooperation, to help you 
to real convictions at some points 
where perhaps now vou have none, 
and to enlarge and to deepen the 
convictions that are already yours. 
If even in small degree this could 
be done, it would be worth all our 
united pains. 

4. But this does not 77iea7i that xve 
are to seek for each a unifor?n outco7?ie. 
That would be utterly impossible in 
any case ; for even those who thought 
they perfectly agreed with such 
statements as I shall make of the 
great Christian truths would quite 
certainly not take them in precisely 
the way I meant them. But even 
if such absolute uniformity of con- 
viction and statement were possible, 
it would still be undesirable. For 
[12] 



TO TEACHERS 



we seek not the unity of monoto- 
nous uniformity, but the organic 
unity that arises from the truth of 
each supplementing the truths of all 
the rest. And, what is more im- 
portant, the infinite truth of God 
is too large for any single finite re- 
flection of it. We approximate it, 
even, only by bringing together the 
varied individual reflections. We 
are unique individuals with our own 
peculiar temperaments and special 
adaptations, to each of whom, we 
have the right to believe, it is given 
to present a kind of personalized and 
individual setting forth of the great 
truth of God in Christ, that has its 
own unique value, which cannot be 
wholly replaced by any other. I 
distinctly, therefore, do not seek 
to reproduce in you my thoughts. 
Each one of you has his own unique 
[13] 



LETTERS 



personality through which God de- 
sires to speak in the peculiar voice 
of that personality ; each of you is a 
member of the body of Christ, and 
each member has his office. What 
I hope for my putting to you of 
Christian truths, therefore, is not 
that my thought may simply over- 
ride or replace yours, but rather may 
quicken and bring out your own 
individual thinking. I could wish 
that my thought might be in your 
minds seeds and germs of truth that 
in their growth in your minds should 
reflect the peculiar nature of the 
mind in which they are planted, 
and so attain an individual living 
power of their own. To some 
extent this is quite certain to be 
the case ; and yet it is worth while 
to make it clear to ourselves that 
we seek nothing else, and that the 
[14] 



TO TEACHERS 



mechanical uniformity is not even 
to be desired. 

In my next letter I want to speak 
of some of the reasons why the 
spiritual life often seems unreal. 



[15] 



/ 



LETTER II 

THE SEEMING UNREALITY OF 
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



L,etter Two 

THE SEEMING UNREALITY OF 
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

I CAN hardly help asking you in 
this letter to face with me another 
preliminary question that is of the 
first importance, before I go on in 
later letters to take up singly the 
great Christian truths. 

Why do not the facts of the 
spiritual world seem as real to us 
as the facts of the material world ? 
Why is the fact of such a God as 
Christ reveals, and of our relations 
to him, not as indubitable, for ex- 
ample, as the existence of other 
persons and our relations to them ? 
In a word, why does the spiritual 
life often seem so unreal ? Why is 
[ 19] 



LETTERS 



the conviction of it a wavering one, 
with its constant ups and downs? 
These are questions that press upon 
us from the start in every thorough- 
going discussion of the reality of a 
spiritual view and of a spiritual life. 
Can something be done now to 
meet this constant difficulty of the 
seeming unreality of the spiritual 
life? Can we see the reason for 
this seeming unreality? 

I have space to speak of only 
three causes, and of these most 
briefly. I must ask you to think 
further than I say. These three 
causes are : mistaken conceptions of 
the character of the spiritual life 
itself; the inevitable fluctuations 
of our natures; and the intended 
obscurity required for our moral 

training. 

I. As to mistaken conceptions. We 

[20] 



TO TEACHERS 



begin with the misconceptions which 
arise from mistaking the nature of 
the spiritual Hfe itself, as a life of 
strain, or a life of imitation or repe- 
tition of others' experiences, or a 
life of magical inheritance, or, fi- 
nally, a life of rules laid on from 
without. 

I. First, the spiritual life is not 
a life of strain^ either in the sense 
of putting pressure upon the mind 
to hold certain beliefs, or in the 
sense of keeping a certain con- 
tinuous stress of attention. It is a 
real struggle, a continuing conflict, 
a life of steady facing of duty ; but 
still it should not be, in any hyster- 
ical sense, a life of strain. 

This means, in the first place, 
that the man who wishes to have 
the spiritual life a reality to him 
will not bring any pressure upon his 

[21] 



LETTERS 



mind to hold certain beliefs. He 
will rather see clearly that his sole 
responsibility is simply to put him- 
self face to face with the great 
realities, and to make an honest re- 
sponse to them. Nor, in the second 
place, does the spiritual life call for 
the keeping up of a certain stress 
of feeling or of attention. There is 
need of clear discrimination at this 
point. The spiritual life does look, 
of course, to a persistent, dominant 
purpose of righteousness, a real sur- 
render of the will to God ; but this 
does not and cannot mean the un- 
changed continuance of some par- 
ticular thought or object fixed in 
the attention, or the steady main- 
tenance of some special state of 
feeling. 

2. It is equally important for us 
to remember, if the spiritual life is 

[22] 



TO TEACHERS 



to be real to us, that the spiritual life 
is not a life of the i^nitation or repeti- 
tion of the experiences of others. That 
we need others here, as elsewhere, 
is clear. That we come into most 
that is of value to us through intro- 
duction by some other, is also plain. 
Nevertheless, if the spiritual world 
is to have the fullest reality for 
us, the reality it ought to have for 
a mind awakened to mature self- 
consciousness, we must have some 
experience in the spiritual that is 
genuinely our own, not a hollow 
echo of something we have heard 
from others. This is not easy. 
Men naturally shrink from it. It is 
far easier to satisfy oneself with a 
very shallow dealing with the prob- 
lem of our life, and then to catch up 
the traditional language of religious 
experience from others. 
[23] 



LETTERS 



3. Again, the spiritual life is not a 
life of magical inheritance of results. 
If the results in the spiritual life are 
conceived as coming without clear 
conditions, in a kind of merely mag- 
ical way, that life unavoidably takes 
on for most men to-day a decided 
aspect of unreality. It has no intel- 
ligible connection with the rest of 
their life, and there seems to be 
nothing they can do with it. This 
simply means that we must recog- 
nize fully that there are laws and 
conditions in the spiritual world. 

4. On the other hand, the spirit- 
ual life is not a life of rules laid on 

from without. Counsels to be heeded 
there certainly are in the religious 
life, and valuable habits to be 
formed. Nevertheless, the heart 
of the life with God can never be 
contained in any prescribed routine 
[24] 



TO TEACHERS 



of rules and regulations. We are 
called to a real life^ with its own 
spontaneous growth and varied ex- 
pressions, and we are called to 
liberty, Christ seems to have been 
concerned not to give rules for holy- 
living or for holy dying, but to trust 
all to the dynamic of the single mo- 
tive of love to his person. His dis- 
ciples are simply asked to be in truth 
disciples, doing only what loving 
loyalty to him would suggest. 

II. But the sense of unreality 
passes over upon the spiritual life 
not only because of mistaken con- 
ceptions of it, but also because 
of the inevitable fluctuations of our 
natures, 

I . With all possible care of bod- 
ily conditions we cannot preserve 
an unvarying state of body ; and 
changing bodily conditions tinge in- 
[25] 



LETTERS 



evitably our mental states. So, too, 
the psychical conditions are constantly 
changing. And with this constant 
change, however produced, we have 
always to reckon. That nothing in 
life should seem always the same to 
us, is the inevitable result. We are 
to expect, therefore, from both 
physical and psychical conditions, 
changing vital feelings, alternation 
of moods, altering power of atten- 
tion, and some consequent ebb and 
flow in conviction and in the sense 
of reality. We are creatures of 
moods. So long as feeling enters 
necessarily so much into our sense 
of the reality of all things, the 
things of the spirit especially, which 
do not force themselves upon us, 
will vary for us in their clearness 
and reality. 

2. But in all this, let it be ob- 
[26] 



TO TEACHERS 



served, we have nothing that is pecu- 
liar to the religious life. It holds for 
all spheres of value, and, indeed, in 
every sphere of life where feeling 
enters at all. This really implies 
that wherever we are not living a 
merely fragmentary life, this ebb 
and tide must be reckoned with ; it 
is involved in our very natures as 
finite and feeling beings. More- 
over, the life of the rejection of all 
ideals and the life of unbelief have 
their fluctuations, too. It is not 
merely the conviction of the highest 
which varies. The lower life, too, 
has its inevitable misgivings. We 
are creatures of two worlds — an 
animal and a spiritual ; and both 
make themselves felt in some de- 
gree. Unbelief has its questionings 
as well as belief. We may not 
choose whether our feeling shall 
[27] 



LETTERS 



vary or not. We can only choose 
the dominant moods. 

3. This leads us to emphasize 
the important principle that when 
we find fluctuations in our convic- 
tions concerning the reality of any- 
thing, we must ask for the witness of 
our consciously best hours, physically, 
intellectually, and morally. If re- 
ligious conviction does tend to go 
up and down with our moral atti- 
tude, and the ethical has any real 
justification, then our religious con- 
victions are just so far confirmed. 
And with reference to the entire 
man, it behooves us to ask. When 
does the spiritual world seem most 
real to us ? in our best or our worst 
moments ? when we are consciously 
most in possession of ourselves in 
every way, or when we are con- 
sciously below our best ? So Tyn- 
[28] 



TO TEACHERS 



dall, for example, tested the doctrine 
of material atomism : " I have. no- 
ticed/' he said, " during years of 
self-observation, that it is not in the 
hours of clearness and vigor that 
this doctrine commends itself to my 
mind." We need, thus, constantly 
to take account of our necessary 
finite limitations and the inevitable 
fluctuations of our life, if we are to 
keep our religious faith clear and 
strong. 

The very fact that these causes 
of the sense of the unreality of the 
spiritual life are to be found in our 
natural constitution suggests that it 
may not be intended that the spir- 
itual life should always seem to us 
real and commanding. And if we 
press the inquiry, Why should this 
be intended ? it seems possible to 
suggest but one answer consonant 
[29] 



LETTERS 



with a genuine religious faith : it 
must be needed as a part of our 
moral training. We are brought, 
thus, to consider the last of the 
causes of the seeming unreality of 
the spiritual life. 

III. T^he seeming unreality is a part 
of our moral training. For the sake, 
then, of our moral training, for 
the sake of deepening the spiritual 
life itself, into which the moral 
is so inextricably woven, there is a 
purposed seeming unreality in spirit- 
ual things. If there is a God at all 
who really means to bring us into 
the highest life, we may confidently 
expect that the conditions of our life 
will be so shaped as to call out in us 
the persistent ethical will. 

I . x\bove all else, this means that 
the conditions must be such that the 
religious life must be a man's own, 
[30] 



TO TEACHERS 



voluntarily chosen and voluntarily 
kept. If this is to be true, a sacred 
reverence for the human personality 
must he a controlling principle in all 
God' s dealing with us. This implies 
that, in the nature of the case, it is 
impossible that there should be any 
forcing of God and the spiritual life 
upon a man. 

2. And if there is to be no forc- 
ing of God and the spiritual world 
upon a man, this would mean, fur- 
ther, that we can expect no absolutely 
incontrovertible evidences^ no over- 
powering signs. A choice will be 
left, some room for our own atti- 
tude of will to have its effect. 

3. But even more than this is to 
be said. Our moral need seems 
plainly to require, also, that there 
shall be no domination of the human 
personality by God' s personality. Not 

[31] 



LETTERS 



only will God not thrust the fact of 
his existence upon us in resistless 
fashion, but in his personal relation 
to us, even after we have voluntarily 
and gladly recognized it, he will still 
sacredly respect our own moral in- 
itiative and our own individuality. 
The very possibility of unmistakably 
genuine character in finite beings 
seems to depend upon the fact that 
God should thus, in at least the pre- 
liminary stages of their training, 
scrupulously remain the indemon- 
strable, the invisible, the hidden, the 
unobtrusive God, showing such a 
reverence for the personality of his 
children as men never show for one 
another. We may expect, then, 
that God's relation to us will be an 
unobtrusive one. 

These, then, seem to me to be 
some of the chief reasons for the 
[32] 



TO TEACHERS 



seeming unreality of the spiritual life 
that we needed to consider if we 
were to have the way cleared for a 
positive putting of the great Chris- 
tian truths. I fear that I have made 
rather severe demands upon your 
attention in this letter ; but I trust 
the considerations urged may be seen 
to mean more and more to you, as 
the years go on. 



[33] 



LETTER III 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS 
CHRIST 



Letter Three 

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS 
CHRIST 

YOU count yourselves, first and 
foremost, disciples of Jesus 
Christ, and the supreme aim of your 
teaching is to bring others into the 
same discipleship. This must mean, 
if either your living or your teaching 
is undertaken with full thoughtful- 
ness, that you call yourselves Chris- 
tians and have become teachers of the 
Christian faith because you believe 
that he from whom you take your 
name is the most significant person 
of history. You believe that Christ's 
life and teaching have more light 
than any other fact of history to 
[37l 



LETTERS 

throw upon God, upon man, upon 
all the varied relations of God and 
man, and so upon the practical prob- 
lem of daily living in its deepest 
aspects. That is, you see God, men, 
and all of life through Christ. 

The first step, therefore, toward 
fundamental Christian truth must 
be some understanding of Christ 
himself. I am to ask you, there- 
fore, to consider with me in this 
letter the very basis of our Christian 
faith. Who is Jesus Christ ? What 
does he mean ? How does he reveal 
God ? What right have we to give 
him so supreme a place in the mas- 
tery of our thinking and living ? 
And I can only answer these questions 
by telling you what Jesus Christ 
seems to me to mean, and so giving 
you a kind of personal confession of 
my own faith in him. In doing 
[38] 



TO TEACHERS 



this, I can hardly avoid repeating in 
substance what I have elsewhere 
said on this most fundamental of all 
Christian themes. Each point de- 
serves much more elaboration than 
I can give it in this brief letter. Try- 
to think them out fully for yourselves. 
I. First, then, Christ seems to me 
to be the greatest in the greatest sphere y 
that of the moral and spiritual. It is 
hardly too much to say that this 
place is given him by the common 
consensus of all thoughtful men who 
really know his spirit and teaching. 
He sees the problem of living more 
broadly and more deeply than any 
other. No other has so grasped 
the full meaning of life. No other 
shows such delicate skill in applying 
moral and spiritual principles. If 
we have anywhere one who may be 
said to speak with full authority in 
[39] 



LETTERS 



the moral and spiritual world, that 
person, assuredly, is Jesus Christ. 

It is perhaps only to put the same 
thing in different form, when one 
says with Fairbairn that Christ is 
transcendent among founders of religion, 
" and to be transcendent here is to 
be transcendent everywhere, for re- 
ligion is the supreme factor in the 
organizing and regulating of our 
personal and collective life.'' Try 
to make clear to yourselves how 
tremendous and all-permeating the 
influence of a founder of a religion 
is. He makes the very light and 
atmosphere in which thousands, 
and perhaps millions, of his fellow 
beings see the whole of their life. 
And among these transcendent lead- 
ers of the race, Jesus himself is 
transcendent. The last forty years 
have been characterized by such a 
[40] 



TO TEACHERS 



Study of the religions of the world 
as has never been seen before. And 
yet it seems to me hardly open to 
doubt that the result of this study is 
not to make the figure of Christ less, 
but more significant. At the most, 
we can hardly do more than bring 
any other religious teacher into 
comparison with Christ at certain 
points. No religious founder will 
bear comparison with him in the 
full scope of either his life or his 
teaching. 

So really is Christ greatest in this 
sphere of the moral and spiritual 
that he becomes for men truly a 
kind of " personalized conscience." 
One may well be challenged to sug- 
gest a higher moral test for a man 
than that which is afforded by the 
spirit of Jesus, as concretely shown 
in his life and teaching. 
[41] 



LETTERS 



2. Jesus is also the sinless and non- 
penitent one. No other, certainly, 
ever intelligently claimed to be sin- 
less ; for no other has the claim ever 
been intelligently made. The great 
historian, von Ranke, carries the 
common judgment of men with him 
when he says : " More guiltless and 
more powerful, more exalted and 
more holy, has naught ever been on 
earth than his conduct, his life, and 
his death ; the human race knows 
nothing that could be brought, even 
afar off, in comparison with it." If 
Christ's unusual moral insight is 
granted at all, if he were not sinless, 
he could neither make the claim nor 
allow the claim to be made. The 
keener his moral consciousness, the 
less likely was he to make any claim 
that was not true. But in one of 
the surest of all the bits of autobi- 
[42] 



TO TEACHERS 



ography that we have from Christ, 
he tells the story of his own struggle 
with the most fundamental tempta- 
tions of his life without the slightest 
hint of moral failure. 

And the claim of the sinlessness 
of Christ, it should be noted, is not 
made so much because of any special 
statements, as because of the fact of 
what Dr. Bushnell has called his 
"impenitent piety," which seems to 
lie upon the very surface of the 
records. There is no indication 
anywhere that he includes himself 
with others in the confession of sin. 
He does not count himself thus with 
other men as needing redemption, 
but as himself clearly able to redeem 
them. And by this fact of non- 
penitence he is marked off definitely 
from all good men. In the face of 
it he cannot simply be called the 
[43] 



LETTERS 



best of good men. In the case of 
all other good men, as they go for- 
ward in the life of righteousness 
with growing ideals, their own con- 
sciousness of failure becomes also 
more clear. Let one contrast, for 
example, the spirit of Jesus here 
with that of perhaps the best of all 
his followers — whom many seem 
willing to make a spiritual author- 
ity side by side with Christ — the 
apostle Paul. The sense of sin and 
of debt to Christ for deliverance from 
sin are both most marked in him, and 
there seems to be in his latest letters 
even an increasing sense of his sin in 
his early rejection of Christ. The 
fact that Christ is '* the only religious 
character that disowns repentance" is 
justly to be regarded as an absolutely 
unique phenomenon among men of 
real moral consciousness. 
[44] 



TO TEACHERS 



3. With the highest of all ideals^ 
Christ consciously rises to that ideal, 
and " compels us to admit that he rises 
to it J" Christ's ideal involves abso- 
lute trust in God, and the spirit of 
absolute love toward God and men. 
And it is to the full measure of this 
ideal that he consciously rises. It 
would be much that men should be 
compelled to admit that a man rose 
to the full measure of any reasonable 
ideal. But that one who sees more 
clearly than any other in the moral 
and spiritual realm, and cherishes 
the highest ideal that it is possible 
for a man to cherish, should con- 
sciously rise to that ideal, and compel 
us to admit that he so rises to it, is 
a fact unparalleled in the history of 
the world. This is far more than 
mere sinlessness. It bears witness 
to a positiveness of moral achieve- 
[45] 



LETTERS 

ment that dwarfs all other human 
attainment. 

4. Jesus has such a character that 
we can transfer it feature by feature to 
God, without any sense of blasphemy and 
without any sense of lack, I am not 
now raising with you any meta- 
physical theory of the person of 
Christ. I only ask you to notice that 
the most enlightened nations of the 
world to-day owe their ideal of God 
to Jesus Christ, — not merely to 
what he said, but to what he was. 
The significant thing is that there 
has been one among us men, the 
circumstances of whose life we in 
large measure know, concerning 
whose character we can say. That 
is what I mean by the character of \ 
God. One may well ask himself 
what he could add to the character 
of God in imagination which has not 
[46] 



TO TEACHERS 



already been set forth, not merely in 
the words of Jesus, but in his actual 
concrete life. Fairbairn is fully justi- 
fied in saying that Jesus is " the first 
being who had realized for man the 
idea of the Divine." What language 
can compass such a fact as that ? 

5. Jesus is consciously able to re- 
deem all men. This, too, seems to 
me to lie upon the very face of the 
record. If there is one thing that 
we can be sure of concerning the 
religion of Jesus, it is that it claimed 
to be a religion of redemption. 
And one is to remember that it is 
this man who knew as no other did 
the meaning of sin and of moral 
conduct, and the meaning of sharing 
the life of God, who could believe 
not only that he himself was right 
in his relation to God, but was able 
to redeem all others to God. The 
[47] 



LETTERS 



Gospel records certainly make it 
clear, in the words of another, that 
" Jesus knows no more sacred task 
than to point men to his own per- 
son." He himself is the way to 
God, the very life of God — con- 
sciously able to redeem all men. 

6. This seems to me to mean, as 
Dr. Denison suggests, that "Jesus has 
such God-consciousness and such sense 
of mission as would topple any other 
brain into insanity , hut only keeps him 
sweety normal^ rational. It is very 
difficult for any of us to get a sense 
of being especially necessary to the 
kingdom of God without serious 
danger of moral lapse in over- 
weening conceit or hysterical strain. 
And there is no suffering that men 
know comparable with the suffering 
that, for example, a father has in the 
sin and shame of his son. A very 
[48] 



TO TEACHERS 



little of such suffering is all that it 
seems possible for a man to bear. 
But here is one who can believe as 
to all other men that they best see 
God as they see him, and that it is 
his to bear the sin of all and to 
redeem all. And still, under this 
immeasurable God-consciousness and 
sense of mission, he can be so sane 
and normal and rational that we 
may contrast in these respects the 
atmosphere of the Gospels with that 
of even our best religious books. In 
the very act of the most stupen- 
dous self-assertion, he can still de- 
clare himself to be preeminently the 
meek and lowly one, and can carry 
our conviction both of his meek- 
ness and of his power to give rest to 
all. For my own part, I cannot 
see that the world offers anywhere 
a comparable phenomenon. 
* [49] 



LETTERS 



7. 'Jesus is the only person who can 
call out absolute trust. And yet, if 
we are to have the spirit of Httle 
children, as Hermann says, " we 
must meet with a personal life which 
compels us to trust it without re- 
serve.'' And he is surely justified in 
adding, '' Only the person of Jesus 
can arouse such trust in a man 
who has awakened to moral self- 
consciousness." We know no other 
person in history into whose hands 
we should feel that we could safely 
put ourselves absolutely without re- 
serve. The New Testament bears 
vivid witness to the trust Christ 
called out, in its glorious transfor- 
mation of the hard and forbidding 
words " master " and f' slave." 

8 . Jesus is the one person of history 
in whom God certainly Jinds us and 
we find God. Here, too, I raise no 

[50] 



TO TEACHERS 



question of any metaphysical theory. 
I only say that it seems to me that 
we have in Jesus a fact so great that 
we can turn to it with assurance, as 
able to bring the conviction of the 
existence and love of God. As one 
turns confidently to the greatest he 
has known in art and literature and 
music to find again the refreshment 
he has before found, so the Christian 
returns confidently to Christ to find 
the indubitable assurance of God. 
" In Christ," as another has said, 
" God turns to the Christian and 
is accessible to him." Harnack's 
words upon just this point have 
always seemed to me to have a 
note of personal confession of faith : 
*' When God and everything that is 
sacred threaten to disappear in dark- 
ness, or our doom is pronounced ; 
when the mighty forces of inex- 
[51] 



LETTERS 



orable nature seem to overwhelm 
us, and the bounds of good and evil 
to dissolve ; when, weak and weary, 
we despair of finding God at all in 
this dismal world — it is then that 
the personality of Christ may save 
us/' 

9. And all this means that 'Jesus 
is the ideal realized. The statement 
may seem commonplace, but the 
fact is not. Speaking philosophic- 
ally, we should have a right to ex- 
pect the realized ideal only in the 
absolute whole of things. And, as 
a matter of fact, we seem to find no 
realized ideals in the lower spheres. 
It is all the more remarkable, there- 
fore, that in this highest sphere of 
all, the sphere of the moral and 
spiritual, we should seem to find our 
fully realized ideal. Ask yourselves, 
as I have often asked myself, what 
[52] 



TO TEACHERS 



you would add to Christ that is not 
in his life, or what you would take 
away from Christ that would make 
you more sure that God was in him, 
spoke and wrought through him, 
that he was in very truth the su- 
preme manifestation of the living 
God. 

If only a tithe of what I have said 
were true, surely here in Christ is 
the supreme fact in history, the one 
priceless fact of the world. We 
may well name ourselves after him, 
and teach him above all. All 
other values, of literature and music 
and art and friendship, go back 
finally to the riches of some personal 
life. Here in Christ are the un- 
searchable riches of the one un- 
fathomable life. The one great, 
all-inclusive, indispensable need of 
men, then, is to know him ; and 
[53] 



LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

the one supreme wisdom is to give 
this greatest of all persons his full 
opportunity with us. We have no 
need to try to force our minds to any 
conviction concerning him. We 
have need only to put ourselves 
steadfastly, attentively, and obedi- 
ently in his presence, to let him 
make his own legitimate impression, 
— bring his own conviction. 



[54] 



LETTER IV 

GOD MANIFEST IN CHRIST 



1 

I 



Letter Four 

GOD MANIFEST IN CHRIST 

TF Christ has at all the significance 
-^ which my last letter indicated, 
then he is able to put us at once in 
the very midst of the spiritual world 
and in touch with God himself. 
He becomes the master-key to all 
our deepest moral and spiritual prob- 
lems, and God himself becomes 
manifest to us in him. We find 
God in Christ. And in our search 
for God we have a right to start di- 
rectly from Christ as undoubtedly 
the most significant of the facts of 
the world, because the surest dis- 
cerner of moral and spiritual truth, 
consciously the completest revealer 



LETTERS 

of God, and carrying most decisively 
the judgment of our own reason and 
conscience at their best. 

Even in the matter of an intel- 
lectual argument for God, we are 
thoroughly justified in starting im- 
mediately from the fact of Christ 
himself, — his life, his teachings, 
and especially his consciousness, — - 
as the greatest and most significant 
fact in the world, and so our best 
proof of the existence of God in the 
full Christian sense. The argument 
goes upon the simple assumption 
that if we are ever to discern the 
real nature of the ultimate world- 
ground, our best light must come 
from the greatest and most signifi- 
cant facts. For myself, for the 
reasons that I have indicated in the 
previous letter, I have no doubt that 
Christ is the most significant of all 
[58] 



TO TEACHERS 



facts known to us, and therefore the 
best basis for direct and decisive 
inference as to the nature of the 
world-ground. The argument does 
not at all go, it should be noticed, 
upon any assumption of the arbitrary- 
authority of Jesus, but simply upon 
the significance of what he is. Any 
authority which we may subse- 
quently give to him is based wholly 
upon what we have in fact found 
him to be. I know no good reason, 
therefore, why one should not count 
the fact of Christ as the greatest of 
all proofs of a completely satisfying 
God, — personal, and of inexhaust- 
ible power and wisdom and love ; 
the proof most powerful to produce 
conviction in the mind of a man 
who has come to full moral self- 
consciousness. The great difficulty 
with practically all the common 
[59] 



LETTERS 



proofs for the existence of God is 
that they do not bring us to any- 
thing like God in the full Christian 
sense in which Christ reveals him. 

But when we speak of God as 
manifested in Christ, we mean much 
more than that Christ can be taken 
simply as the most hopeful datum 
for a new argument for the exist- 
ence and attributes of God. No 
merely intellectual argument of any 
kind can put us into personal rela- 
tion with God, and only this brings 
a man really into the religious 
life. 

If, therefore, we are to be Chris- 
tians in truth, we must find in 
Christ much more than the begin- 
ning of an intellectual argument for 
God. And, as we have seen, we 
count ourselves first and foremost 
his disciples because we believe not 
[60] 



TO TEACHERS 



only that he is the greatest teacher, 
and lived the most perfect life, but 
because we believe him a personality 
so great that one has only to put 
himself persistently in his presence 
to find God a real and present fact, 
a living personality in vital touch 
with our own personal life. 

In the deeply significant words 
of another : " This thought, that 
when the historical Christ takes 
such hold of us, we have to do with 
God himself — this thought is cer- 
tainly the most important element 
in the confession of the Deity of 
Christ for any one whom he has 
redeemed. We do not reach this 
thought by way of a logical conclu- 
sion from that which we have ex- 
perienced at the hands of Christ, 
but the experience itself is such that 
when we confess his Deity, we 
[6i] 



LETTERS 

simply give him his right name. 
When we understand his Person, we 
grasp the expression God gives us 
of his feehng toward us, or God 
himself as a Personal Spirit work- 
ing upon us. In Christ God turns 
to the Christian and is accessible 
to him.'' Luther expresses most 
strongly this great Christian confes- 
sion of God manifested in Christ : 
** This is the first principle and most 
excellent article, how Christ is in 
the Father : that we are able to 
have no doubt that whatsoever that 
man says and does is counted and 
must be counted said and done in 
heaven, for all angels ; in the world, 
for all rulers ; in hell, for all devils ; 
in the heart, for every evil con- 
science and all secret thoughts. For 
if we are certain of this : that what 
he thinks, speaks, and wills the 
[62] 



TO TEACHERS 



Father also wills, then I can defy- 
all that may fight and rage at me. 
For here in Christ I have the 
Father's heart and will." And in 
this great confession of Christ men 
may unite who may differ widely 
in metaphysical theories. 

Jesus, that is, does much more 
than to teach us that God is Father ; 
he so reveals the very spirit and love 
of God in his life that he enables 
us to believe that God is Father, 
enables us to trust ourselves abso- 
lutely to his forgiving love and his 
strengthening grace, and so brings 
us into our true position as chil- 
dren of God. In Christ, thus, in 
his living personality, the Christian 
finds God himself manifested as no- 
where else, and finds, therefore, for 
himself, the way to life. Jesus has 
become for him in very deed the 
[63] 



LETTERS 



way to God, the truth of God, the 
very life of God. 

It is not strange, then, that the 
New Testament comes to sum up 
its great primitive confession in the 
baptismal and benediction formulas, 
which affirm a God who is in his 
very nature Father, living love ; 
who is manifested in the living, 
concrete personality of Jesus Christ, 
our Lord and Master ; and who, in 
loving care for his individual chil- 
dren, makes himself known through 
the great manifestation in Christ by 
his Spirit in each individual heart. 
Christianity becomes, thus, what 
Fairbairn calls it, a " priestless 
religion " ; for every disciple of 
Jesus has himself become, through 
this vision of the heart of Christ, 
prophet, priest, and king, — seer of 
the supreme vision of God himself, 
[64] 



TO TEACHERS 



in direct communion with God, and 
with the promise of complete spirit- 
ual conquest. 

This is the great goal of your 
teaching ; and it is only as this goal 
is reached that your pupils really see 
God manifest in Christ. 



[65] 



LETTER V 

MEN IN THE LIGHT OF CHRIST 



LjCtter Five 

MEN IN THE LIGHT OF CHRIST 

TN our last letter we saw that we 
•*- were able to believe in God as 
Father because of his supreme mani- 
festation in Jesus Christ, because we 
were able to think of the spirit of 
Christ's life as truly representing the 
spirit of God, and so could believe 
that the very life of God was a life 
of self-giving love. This is the 
revelation of God which Christ 
gives, both in his living and in his 
teaching. 

And Christ is plainly certain that 

this life of God must be regarded as 

the one source of life and light and 

blessing for all men. God's life 

[69] 



LETTERS 



must be the standard, therefore, not 
alone of character, but also of happi- 
ness. And it is into the sharing of 
that life of God that Christ desires 
to bring all. This thought of God as 
Father, as living, self-giving love, de- 
termines now all else in the thought of 
Christ. It determines not only his 
conception of God, but his concep- 
tion, also, of men, of the world, of 
life, and of all the future. I am to 
ask you to see, in this letter, what 
this thought of God as Father, 
manifested in Christ, means in our 
conception of men. How must we 
think of men when we see them in the 
light of Christ ? 

Because Christ knows God as 
Father, he inevitably sees men as the 
children of God: on the one hand, in 
the purpose and desire of God, akin 
to God and with unmeasured possi- 
[70] 



TO TEACHERS 



bilities ; on the other hand, so far as 
they are disobedient children of God, 
Christ sees men in their sin and deep 
need. 

First, then, Christ cannot believe 
that God is the really loving Father, 
and that his life is the only true life, 
and not see at once that men can come 
into a significant life only so far as they 
are able to enter into God' s own life of 
love. And it is to this, Christ is sure 
that God has appointed men. While, 
then, w^e still cherish the unloving, 
the unforgiving spirit, w^e are irrev- 
ocably shut out from God's life. 
Even in a great human love of a 
noble man, the relation is inevitably 
hindered when we allow ourselves 
consciously to fall below the spirit 
of the nobler life. So, still more, in 
our relation with God, must the 
harbored evil build a wall of separa- 
[71] 



LETTERS 



tion. In the purpose of God, there- 
fore, Christ sees men as really akin 
to the heavenly Father^ having a per- 
sonality like the Father's, and capa- 
ble, in their free choice, of living in 
loving personal relations with both 
God and men. Christ believes in 
men, in the greatness conferred by 
God upon them, and in their divine 
possibilities. In the thought of 
Christ, thus, no limits can be set to 
man's growth in knowledge, in 
power, in character, in the ongoing 
of his sharing in the life of God, 
and thus in his coming increasingly 
into just such ethical and spiritual 
relations to God as those in which 
Christ stood. 

And that men are children of God 

means, further, to Christ, that every 

man, though he may be in the 

wrong, is still a child of the heav- 

[72] . 



TO TEACHERS 



enly Father, loved of God, grieved 
over, longed for, sought out. 

Once more, because God is Father, 
and his Hfe of love is the one true 
life, that men should be children of 
God means, also, that they must be 
brothers one of another. If I am to 
love men,- 1 need to believe that the 
life of every man is knit up indisso- 
lubly with my own, that he is like 
me, and that he is in very truth a 
child of God. Then I cannot wish 
to kill or hate or despise or condemn 
him. 

That men are my brothers means, 
then, in the first place, that our lives 
are indissolubly knit up together. For, 
to mention no other consideration, 
for your own life, according to 
Christ's fundamental principle, you 
need most of all to love. And to 
refuse to love, to refuse to pour 
[73] 



LETTERS 

out your life into the life of others, 
is to doom yourself to the dreadful 
loneliness and fruitlessness of the 
selfish life. To real enlargement 
of life there is one sole way — 
through the giving of ourselves in 
loving self-sacrifice to others. He 
who refuses to take this way only 
'' tightens his chains in struggling to 
be free." Orville Dewey is but fol- 
lowing out Christ's own teaching 
when he says: "Every relation to 
mankind, of hate or scorn or neglect, 
is full of vexation and torment. 
There is nothing to do with men 
but to love them ; to contemplate 
their virtues with admiration, their 
faults with pity and forbearance, and 
their injuries with forgiveness.' Task 
all the ingenuity of your mind to 
devise some other thing, but you can 
never find it. To hate your adver- 
[74] 



TO TEACHERS 



sary will not help you ; to kill him 
will not help you ; there is nothing 
within the compass of the universe 
can help you, but to love him/' 

And that men are our brothers 
means, also, that whether we will or 
not, they are really very like us. We 
may strive to put them in quite 
another class, and yet, if we will be 
honest, we are constrained to admit 
that they are, nevertheless, in the 
great essentials, just like us, made 
with the same faculties, the same 
fundamental doubleness of nature, 
the same variableness, the same great 
possibilities, and the same great uni- 
versal interests ; and these respects 
which are common to us all are, after 
all, greater than those which divide 
class from class. 

This vision of men as children of 
God even in their disobedience, and 
[75] 



LETTERS 



as brothers one of another in their 
necessary recognition of their like- 
ness and of the indissoluble way 
in which their lives are knit to- 
gether, Christ never loses. Because 
he knows that the only true life is 
the life of the heavenly Father, 
which is the life of love, he must 
believe that the Father has made all 
men capable of this life, and desires 
that into it they all should be 
brought. Even in their sin and 
need, therefore, Christ sees men still 
as children away from the Father's 
house and from his life of love, and 
therefore in darkness, in loneliness, in 
emptiness and misery and want, and 
in sin against the Father's love. 
For them there can be no way back 
into light and friendship and large- 
ness and richness of life, and right- 
eousness, but the way back to the 
[76] 



TO TEACHERS 



Father's house, into the sharing of 
his own life of love. 

And Christ knows so fully the 
inexorableness of this demand for 
love as the one source of life, that 
he knows that the whole spiritual life 
is a unity, that no part of the life of 
men can go up or down alone, that 
it is all of a piece, that good or evil 
cherished anywhere tends to per- 
meate the v^hole. From Christ's 
point of view, therefore, whatever 
the wrong another has done me, still 
suspicion and contempt and hate are 
the very working of death in me. 
And for my own life's sake, I must 
throw them off. On the other hand, 
every bit of true love counts. 

It is, then, just because Christ sees 
so clearly that love is life and hate is 
death, that he must insist so strenu- 
ously upon the most radical carrying 



LETTERS 

through of the loving spirit. He 
knows, therefore, that the com- 
mands of the loving Father are laid 
on us in love, and that we come into 
life and blessing, not in the propor- 
tion in which we evade these com- 
mands of the Father, but rather in 
just the proportion in which we 
may radically carry them through 
to the completest fulfilment. It is, 
therefore, not because Christ desires 
to lay upon us a harder law, that he 
gives such deep, inner interpretation 
of the law of righteousness in the 
Sermon on the Mount, but only be- 
cause of his consuming passion to 
bring us into the fullest life. 

The sin of men, thus, from 
Christ's point of view, can only be 
seen in its true depth and ugliness 
and deadliness when we set it over 
against the love of God and the 
[78] 



TO TEACHERS 



longing of the heavenly Father for 
every son of man. Both the great- 
ness and the sin of men, therefore, 
are to be seen only in the light of 
the supreme revelation of God in 
Christ himself. And when we thus 
see men as they are in Christ's ideal, 
and as they are in their estrange- 
ment from God, we see, at the same 
time, the true and the false life. 

And so we have, as I understand 
it, Christ's doctrine of man, of sin, 
and of righteousness. It all grows 
directly out of the thought of God 
as Father. The great essentials of 
Christ's thought here you can make 
plain even to a child ; but its signifi- 
cance deepens with every year of 
growth. 



[79] 



LETTER VI 

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS A 
FRIENDSHIP 



^ 



Ljetter Six 

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS A 
FRIENDSHIP 

WHEN Christ makes the sum 
of his gospel the revelation 
of God as Father, when he sums up 
all life in the one great command- 
ment of love to God and to men, 
when he makes the supreme test of 
the judgment to lie in a ministering 
love, — in all these statements alike 
he seems to be declaring that the 
life of the disciple of Christ is 
simply a life of friendship. It 
seems to me sometimes that it is 
because of the very simplicity of 
Christ's message that it escapes us. 
We admit it all as though it were 
[83] 



LETTERS 



a matter of course, and still fail to 
draw the first inferences from it. 

And yet, in very truth the Chris- 
tian life is a friendship — with 
God, with men. The problem of 
life is the problem of friendship , This 
is to be deliberately, even philosoph- 
ically, said. For persons are the 
most certain of facts, the most im- 
portant of facts, and the most per- 
manent of facts. 

Persons are the most certain of 
facts. In all our life no fact is so 
certain as the existence of persons. 
Many philosophies have questioned 
the reality of the external world of 
matter, but no philosophy has ever 
seriously questioned the existence of 
persons. 

Persons, too, are for us the most 
important facts, because in our rela- 
tions to them we find the greatest 
[84] 



TO TEACHERS 



sources both of happiness and of 
character. We live in these per- 
sonal relations. It is our friends 
who reveal us to ourselves ; our 
friends who, in Emerson's phrase, 
" make us do what we can.'' 

And persons are not less certainly 
the most abiding facts. Only a 
friendship can be eternal. " Love 
never faileth." " The world pass- 
eth away, . . . but he that doeth 
the will of God abideth for ever." 
Rightly to fulfil these personal rela- 
tions, human and divine, in the 
midst of which we are placed, 
that is, simply to be a good friend, 
is the sum of all. For love is 
the central virtue, all-embracing. 
As Paul argues, " Love worketh no 
ill to his neighbor : love therefore 
is the fulfilment of the law." The 
conception, consequently, of that 
[85] 



LETTERS 



denomination whom others call 
Quakers, but who call themselves 
" Friends/' is close to the very 
center of the gospel. Christ calls 
his disciples to live the life of obedi- 
ent children of God, and of brothers 
one of another, — to have and to 
show increasingly the simply friendly 
spirit. 

And the New Testament every- 
where conceives the relation in 
which the disciple stands to God as 
an individual, intimate, constant, and 
unobtrusive personal relation of the 
Spirit of God to the man's spirit. 
Other figures of speech are used in 
setting forth this relation ; but the 
dominant conception throughout the 
New Testament is personal. We 
have a clear right, therefore, to 
affirm that from the point of view 
of Christ's own teaching, and of 
[86] 



TO TEACHERS 



the New Testament generally, the 
Christian life is to be conceived as 
a personal relation of friendship with 
God on the one hand, and with oar 
fellow men on the other. When, 
then, you are trying to bring your 
pupils into the Christian life, you 
are seeking to introduce them into a 
life even so simple as this. You are 
only trying to persuade them to be 
good friends, obedient children of 
the heavenly Father, true brothers 
one of another. '' Beloved, let us 
love one another : for love is • of 
God ; and every one that loveth is 
begotten of God, and knoweth 
God." 

Let me ask you to think with me, 
then, for a moment of the signifi- 
cance of this simple conception of 
the Christian life, and to note the 
light which it throws on the knowl- 
[87] 



LETTERS 



edge of God, on the unity of Hfe, and 
on our relations to others, 

I. And, first, how am I to find 
God ? " This is life eternal,'' John 
makes Jesus say, " that they should 
know thee the only true God, and 
him whom thou didst send, even 
Jesus Christ." This conception, 
that my relation to God is primarily 
that of a personal friendship, makes 
impossible a merely creedal, or tech- 
nically religious conception of that 
relation. We need, no doubt, to 
know many things about God ; but 
knowledge about God is not the same 
thing as that acquaintance with God 
which Jesus evidently has in mind. 
It is quite possible, in this sense, to 
be Christian in head and pagan in 
heart ; to have learned much of 
theology, and yet to be sadly clear 
that one stands in no close relation 
[88] 



TO TEACHERS 



to God himself. It is not primarily 
by the searching of the intellect that 
we find our way to God. Nor is it 
primarily even by religious exercises 
that we draw near to God. I should 
wish to be very far from underes- 
timating the value of either prayer 
or Bible study ; on the contrary, I 
believe them of vital importance. 
But Christ gave few directions for 
either. And he made it very clear 
that no man was prepared to pray, 
who was not willing to have the 
forgiving and the loving spirit. Not 
primarily, then, by the searching 
of the intellect, and not primarily 
by way of religious exercises, but 
by catching, in the presence of 
Christ, his own spirit of love, are 
we prepared to find in him the su- 
preme revelation of God. 

Only love can believe in love other 
[ 89 ] 



LETTERS 



than sentimentally. And it was 
those who had ministered in the 
loving spirit, who, Christ showed, 
had done it even unto him. No 
argument or demonstration, no ec- 
static visions of Christ, no religious 
experiences, no prophesying in his 
name, can take the place of the lov- 
ing spirit. The cup of cold water 
given in the name of the disciple is 
itself a direct road, Christ assures us, 
to the vision of the manifestation of 
God in him. Just so we find him. 
But we are often not really willing 
to take this lowly, simple way to 
God. We want to make great de- 
monstrations and learned arguments, 
and feel the thrill of marvelous 
religious experiences with magical 
changes. And yet it is still true 
that " every one that loveth is be- 
gotten of God, and knoweth God." 
[90] 



TO TEACHERS 



II. And this conception of the 
Christian Ufe as friendship brings, 
also, wonderful unity into life. If the 
spirit that is required of us in rela- 
tion both to God and to men is 
essentially the same spirit, then all 
our life is wonderfully simplified 
and unified. The first and the 
second great commandments are 
bound up together. God's lessons 
are close at hand. Every human 
relationship becomes, thus, a teacher 
of God. We are helped into a true 
love of God in the proportion in 
which we are most faithfully fulfil- 
ling the common relations of our 
daily life. To be a good son, a 
good brother, a good husband, a 
good father, a good friend, — all 
this directly helps into right rela- 
tions to God. What it means to 
call God " Father," and to think of 
[91] 



LETTERS 

ourselves as his " children/' and to 
say that he '* loves " us, we must 
largely learn in the very midst of 
our human relationships. Every 
genuine love is, thus, both an evi- 
dence of the divine love and a prep- 
aration for it. The old ascetic and 
monkish idea, therefore, that we 
were peculiarly drawing near to 
God as we withdrew from human 
relationships, is found to be neces- 
sarily out of harmony with Christ's 
fundamental conception. If the true 
life is the life of love, we must 
learn it not apart from men, but 
among them. We draw near to 
God as we draw near to men. 

III. This simple conception of 
the Christian life as a friendship 
has also its light to throw upon our 
relations to others. For it empha- 
sizes, on the one hand, the duty of 
[ 92 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



enlarging the circle of our friends, 
and, on the other hand, the duty of 
deepening our friendships. Obvi- 
ously, if in Christ's thought the 
world's goal is the civilization of 
brotherly men, his disciples must 
more and more and everywhere 
prove themselves friends. Impor- 
tant as it is that one should be 
faithful to what we call our specific 
religious duties to other men, Christ's 
own judgment test makes it clear 
that the great question of the 
judgment will be, not. With how 
many have you spoken concerning 
their souls ? but. With how many 
have you earned the right to speak 
of the things that lie deepest and 
are most sacred to them ? With 
how many have you shown your- 
self truly friendly ? How many 
know that you love them } " Inas- 
[93] 



LETTERS 



much as ye did it unto one of these 
my brethren, even these least, ye 
did it unto me/' 

And if the Christian life is funda- 
mentally friendship, and implies not 
only the duty of steadily enlarging 
the circle of our friends, but also 
the duty of deepening our friend- 
ships, one may well confront him- 
self again and again with the 
questions. How deep and sacred a 
thing is friendship to you ? How 
large and rich a self are you giving 
to your friends ? Have you any 
friendship that could easily be con- 
ceived as a type of the perfect life 
in God ? How far are you achiev- 
ing the highest in friendship ? In 
some measure, surely, that ought to 
be true of every disciple of Christ 
which Baron Bunsen said of his 
wife, as, dying, he looked up into 
[94] 



TO TEACHERS 



her face, *^ In thy face I have seen 
the face of the Eternal.'* And our 
highest service to our pupils in seek- 
ing to bring them into the eternal 
life lies in this, that they should 
catch some glimpses of God through 
our lives. 



[95] 



LETTER VII 

THE BASIS IN THE DIVINE 
FRIENDSHIP 



^satemam 



I^etter Seven 

THE BASIS IN THE DIVINE 
FRIENDSHIP 

TN my last letter I asked you to see 
-■" that, in entire harmony with 
Christ's own thought and the deepest 
trend of the New Testament writ- 
ings, we could best conceive of the 
Christian life as simply a friendship 
— with God, with men. If this is 
a true conception, then the very 
beginning of the life with God, of 
communion with him, is our en- 
trance upon this divine friendship, 
which necessarily involves, at the 
same time, a life of love toward 
men. The conditions of a deep- 
ening spiritual life, the conditions 

Lorc.f99] 



LETTERS 



of all growth in the Christian life, 
are simply the conditions of a 
deepening friendship with God and 
men. And these conditions are 
essentially the same for our relation 
with God as for our relation with 
men. We may think of our reli- 
gious life as simply a deepening 
acquaintance with God, and may 
ask at once what the conditions are 
upon which that friendship with 
God may deepen. 

Let us ask, then, what the basis 
is in any true friendship. If God 
is a person, and we are persons 
and our relation to him is conse- 
quently first of all a personal rela- 
tion, then the basis of our personal 
relation with him must be that of 
any true friendship. And it is be- 
cause I hope that you teachers will 
find this conception helpful not 
[ 100 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



only in your own lives, but es- 
pecially helpful in presenting the 
Christian life to your pupils, that I 
am asking you to note with me that 
the facts which must lie at the 
basis of every friendship worthy of 
the name are exactly those facts 
that have to be considered in lay- 
ing the foundation of any genuine 
Christian life. 

Now the foundation of all high 
friendship, whether with God or 
with men, so far as I can see, must 
be threefold : mutual self-revelation 
and answering trust, mutual self- 
surrender, and some deep commun- 
ity of interests. 

I. And, first, at the basis of 
every friendship, human and divine, 
must lie mutual self-revelation and 
answering trust. All deepening of 
personal relations involves such in- 

[lOl] 



LETTERS 



creasing revelation on the part of 
each of the friends, and an answer- 
ing trust as well on the part of 
each. The terms '^ revelation '' and 
" trust/' therefore, that we some- 
times think of as peculiarly religious, 
are in truth not peculiar to reUgion 
at all, but necessarily involved in 
every true friendship. If a friend- 
ship is to grow, one cannot always 
be '* on probation." " Perfect love 
casteth out fear." Self-revelation and 
answering trust assume, of course, 
association. In our relation to God, 
it assumes, above all, our staying 
in the presence of Christ in the 
Word. 

And the trust that must underlie 
our friendship with God, as our 
friendship with men, must be a 
trust both in the character and in 
the love of the other. One does 

[102] 



TO TEACHERS 



not need to make terms with a real 
friend. He can trust his friend out 
of his sight. Now God has meant 
to make the greatest possible proof 
both of his character and of his 
love in his revelation in Christ. 
He asks for no trust without evi- 
dence. He might rather ask. Have 
I not given you reason to trust my 
love? What more can or would 
you ask than I have already made 
plain in Christ ? Growing revela- 
tion, too, calls out growing trust, as 
also growing trust calls out growing 
revelation. The friendship deepens 
at every point with the growth of 
this double basis. 

It is no mystery, then, that faith 
is so prominent a word in Christian- 
ity, because we have in Christ the 
greatest of all self-revelations of 
the greatest person, calling out, 
[ 103] 



LETTERS 



therefore, the supreme faith. More- 
over, there is a special reason why, 
in our relation to God, we must 
walk by faith. If there is danger 
in any friendship that the stronger 
personality may override the life 
of his friend, the danger is still 
greater in our relation with God. 
His relation to us must not be an 
obtrusive one. We need the invis- 
ible God. If we are at all to make 
choices that are our own, we must 
walk here by faith, not by sight. 
And it is not more true that God 
asks our trust than that he also 
trusts us. How priceless are the 
interests that he has committed to 
us in his kingdom, and how cer- 
tainly does the freedom from mere 
rules in the religion of Christ show 
his willingness to rest all on our 
loyal love to him ! 
[ 104] 



TO TEACHERS 



II. But in the basis of any true 
friendship there must be, also, mu- 
tual self -surrender. Perhaps the best 
definition of love that we know is 
the giving of the self. It is not 
things, nor any certain kind of 
treatment that we ask from our 
friends, but themselves. This giv- 
ing of the self presupposes, of course, 
trust. One cannot absolutely sub- 
mit without absolute trust. And 
the depth of the friendship depends 
upon the completeness with which 
the self is given ; the significance 
of the friendship, upon the richness 
of the self given. One can almost 
range his friendships, upon careful 
thought, in an ascending scale, de- 
pending upon the extent to which 
he gives himself in them. And 
the duty of growth connects itself 
at once with the fact that in our 
[ 105 ] 



LETTERS 



friendships we can ultimately give 
nothing but ourselves. If, there- 
fore, we are to have much here to 
give, we must take pains to fulfil 
the conditions of our own growth. 

One who has once wakened up 
to the significance of a high friend- 
ship certainly understands that such 
a friendship is not, as one has said, 
"a weakening denial of self, but 
a strengthening affirmation of self," 
that every such added friendship is 
an enlargement of life. When, 
then, we try to think of this self- 
giving as applied to our relation to 
God, we see at once that the de- 
mand for a surrender of ourselves is 
no demand peculiar to God, and no de- 
mand arbitrary m God, In demand- 
ing such giving of ourselves, God 
makes the same kind of demand 
that we make on one another. 
[ io6 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



And it is just as certain that the de- 
mand is not an arbitrary one. God 
must ask that we shall give ourselves 
completely to him, if he is to give 
himself completely to us. It is 
passing strange that the terms *' self- 
surrender," " self-giving," " com- 
plete consecration," have so hard 
and different a sound in religion 
than in other relations. We see 
the facts as they are only when we 
see that these terms stated in the 
relation to God, even as in relation 
to man, are simply the inevitable, 
glad condition upon which alone 
the best in friendship may come 
to us. 

There seem to me, sometimes, to 
be two opposite instincts in man, — 
self-devotion and the insatiate thirst 
for love. And it is the great, unique 
contribution of religion, that it 
[ 107 ] 



LETTERS 



introduces us to that one relation 
in which both these instincts can 
be absolutely unchecked and com- 
pletely satisfied. In every human 
relation, even the closest and dear- 
est, there are many limitations. In 
much we must all live alone. 
There is only one in which we can 
give ourselves unstintedly, only one 
relation which is wholly satisfying. 

III. The two fundamental ele- 
ments in every friendship, and so in 
our friendship with God, already 
noted — mutual self-revelation and 
answering trust, and mutual self- 
surrender — both point forward to 
the need of so7ne deep community of 
interests in the highest friendship. 
It is not necessary that one's closest 
friends should agree with him in his 
whims and fancies and hobbies or 
even in his occupations. But it is 
[io8] 



TO TEACHERS 



necessary that there should be agree- 
ment as to the great abiding aims 
and ideals and purposes. No friend- 
ship can be all it ought to be in 
which there is not sympathy in the 
highest moments. If one is con- 
scious that when he is really at his 
best he is obliged to leave his friends 
outside, as not able to understand or 
enter into this best, then he knows 
the pain of finding that his highest 
self awakens no response in his 
closest friends. In the greatest 
friendships one must be able to say 
to his friend. The interests which 
are supreme to you shall be supreme 
to me. Not less than this, cer- 
tainly, must we be able to say to 
God, if we are to lay the basis of 
an abiding friendship. It is the 
characteristic petition, therefore, of 
the disciple of Christ that he should 
[ 109 ] 



LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

pray, " Thy kingdom come. Thy 
will be done.'' 

Can we teachers not make it 
plain to our pupils that coming into 
the Christian life is even so simple 
and yet so deep a matter as coming 
into the best friendships anywhere ? 
We are children of the heavenly 
Father, who has so revealed himself 
to us as to call out our completest 
trust, who gives himself to us as he 
asks that we should give ourselves 
to him, and who seeks from us that 
we should identify our interests and 
lives with his. In laying this plain 
basis of friendship with God, we 
are proceeding precisely as in all 
the other deepest relations of life, 
and the steps are not more obscure 
in the one case than in the other. 



[ "o] 



LETTER YIII 

THE CONDITIONS OF DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE WITH GOD 



Letter Right 

THE CONDITIONS OF DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE WITH GOD 

TT 7E are trying together, let us 
^ ^ not forget, to find our way 
into the deepest truths of the Chris- 
tian faith and life. We are trying 
to see them so deeply and yet so 
simply that we may be able not only 
fully to grasp them for ourselves, 
but also to be able to make them 
clear and effective to our pupils. 
I have not known how to do this 
with you without using lines of 
thought which I have followed 
elsewhere in my writing. But this 
you will pardon. I have had very 
little to say about the technical 

8 [113] 



LETTERS 



terms of theology, and yet, if you 
will review the ground now covered, 
you will see that we have been 
dealing with some of the most fun- 
damental conceptions of the Chris- 
tian faith. 

I have not felt that it was possible 
for me to bring you into the very 
heart of these greatest of all truths 
without constant reference to Christ 
and to his all-inclusive teaching of 
the Father. We have really simply 
been asking for the inevitable impli- 
cations of his thought of God as 
Father and men as children, when 
we have conceived the Christian life 
as in its very essence a friendship, 
and thus have been asking what the 
foundation to be laid in such a 
friendship must be. I am to ask 
you to go with me still a little 
further along this same line, get- 
[ "4] 



TO TEACHERS 



ting all the light that it is possible 
for our best human friendships to 
throw upon this personal relation 
to God. That is, how are we to 
go forward to build upon the basis 
already noted — mutual self-revela- 
tion and answering trust, mutual 
self-surrender, and some deep com- 
munity of interests ? This is to ask 
how it is that God is redeeming us 
to himself. 

I. An Unconscious Growth. First, 
let us make it clear to ourselves 
that any high friendship is much 
more an unconscious growth than it is 
a work of conscious arrangement. It 
would not be wise for two friends to 
say to each other. Go to, now, let 
us have a great friendship. Great 
friendships are not so brought about. 
Our main concern, therefore, in our 
relation to God should be a careful 
[115] 



LETTERS 

fulfilment of the conditions upon 
which a friendship may naturally 
deepen ; then we may count with 
certainty upon the result. Neither 
in the human nor in the divine rela- 
tions is it usually possible for a great 
friendship to result from mere con- 
scious effort. The most important 
part, usually, in a friendship is the 
result of unconscious growth. And 
it would mean much for the nor- 
mality and the joy of our Christian 
lives, if we could keep this simple 
thought in mind. 

2. A^^ Continuous 'Emotion, In 
any friendship, also, we may well 
remember that while we do well to 
assure ourselves of the meaning of 
the friendship, we are not to expect 
continuous emotion. There are, no 
doubt, great differences here with 
different dispositions. Those who 
[ii6] 



TO TEACHERS 



find themselves naturally emotional 
in other things may expect a larger 
degree of emotion in the religious 
life than belongs to others. But in 
no case is warm emotion to be ex- 
pected as a continuous experience. 
This is indicated, too, by the char- 
acter of the very natures involved 
in such unbroken high emotions. 
Neither our physical nor mental con- 
stitutions permit the constant strain. 
To attempt this in any personal rela- 
tion is simply to invite failure. The 
deliberate seeking of great experi- 
ences for their own sake is always 
unwise. The best cannot so come. 
No acquaintance, moreover, human 
or divine, will stand constant intro- 
spection, and we cannot, therefore, 
wisely subject our religious life to 
such persistent self-examination as is 
certain to follow if emotional expe- 



LETTERS 

rience is made the main aim and test. 
Under such examination we do not 
see our own states of mind in their 
normal condition. They inevitably 
change under inspection. The one 
course of wisdom for us is simply to 
go steadily forward in faithful fulfil- 
ment of the natural conditions of a 
deepening friendship, and so to be 
sure of the results. We can be cer- 
tain that God desires to receive us as 
his children, and in trust in his love 
we need only press faithfully on in 
fulfilling our part in the deepening 
of this filial relation. 

3. Association. The main factor in 
a deepening acquaintance is associa- 
tion. All directions for the deep- 
ening of our friendship with God 
may be almost summed up in this 
single suggestion. An acquaintance 
is not the product of certain rules, 
[118] 



TO TEACHERS 



but the unconscious result of much 
association. One wakes up with a 
kind of surprise to find how much a 
friendship means to him. And in 
our relation to God this is still the 
main factor. It is only through 
constant association with God that 
we grow into his life. And so 
Christ assures us that the Spirit has 
been given to " be with you for 
ever " ; that we are to '' abide '' in 
him and he in us ; that we are to 
seek such unity with Christ as he 
himself has with the Father. The 
greatest of all the conditions, there- 
fore, of a deepening acquaintance 
with God, is much association with 
him ; giving Christ opportunity 
with us by attention, by thought, 
by living much in the atmosphere 
of his life, by finding it second 
nature to think his thoughts, to 
[119] 



LETTERS 

feel his feelings, and to will his 
purposes. 

4. Time. Time is necessary for 
growth into anything of really great 
value. We need not be surprised, 
therefore, to find that a main condi- 
tion of growing into a deepening 
friendship with God must be the 
giving of some time. No acquaint- 
ance can heco7ne deep without time 
given. Any love will grow cold to 
which no time is given. This is the 
practical way in which we do give 
ourselves to our friends. One has 
only to look over his own experience 
to see that he has allowed certain 
friendships quite to drift out of his 
life simply because a little time was 
not expended to keep them alive. 

It is just here that there lies the 
prime significance of the taking of 
daily time for Bible study and for 
[ 120 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



prayer. These are no magical con- 
ditions. In recognizing their neces- 
sity, we are simply fulfilling the 
same conditions which hold for any 
true friendship. Just as it is a 
matter of serious importance in the 
family that the members of the 
household should be often together, 
so we need to put ourselves in the 
presence of God in the use of his 
Word and of prayer, that he may 
have opportunity to share with us 
his own life, and to bring us into 
some real unity with him. 

And besides these special daily 
times of association with God, we 
may well remember, also, the signifi- 
cance of occasional longer times. One 
knows how certain friendships have 
deepened for him immensely because 
the two friends have been shut up 
to each other for a considerable 

[121] 



LETTERS 

time, perhaps in travel, so that they 
have been almost obliged to get 
down beneath the mere surface of 
their lives, and through the longer 
association, to come to share some- 
thing of the inmost and best that 
has been given them. So in our 
relation to God, an occasional tak- 
ing of a much longer time than 
is usual for the daily Bible study 
and prayer, may yield large results. 
For myself, I am sure that nothing 
has been worth so much to me in 
my own life as the times when I 
have been able to stay face to face 
with God in the Word for three or 
four hours at a stretch, taking oppor- 
tunity really to get down into the 
great truths and to get some glimpse 
of the great revelations of God. 

5. The importance for a growing 
Christian life of the regular use of the 
[122] 



TO TEACHERS 



Bible is so great that it deserves 
special emphasis. We are to remem- 
ber that decision for the Christian 
life means the opening of the life 
to God, and that its continuance, 
consequently, depends on keeping 
the life so open to this new, great- 
est, transforming, personal relation. 
And keeping the life so open de- 
pends, in its turn, above all, on 
regular Bible study. He who keeps 
such study steadily going is practi- 
cally certain to maintain his Chris- 
tian life and to grow intelligently 
in it. He who does not is pretty 
certain finally to fail. 

The reasons for this central im- 
portance of the Scripture can be 
seen from different points of view. 
For if one starts from the idea of 
environment, we must remember 
that that part of our environment 
[ 123] 



LETTERS 



makes us to which we attend. And 
probably the greatest way in which 
we can be sure to put ourselves 
within reach of a strong spiritual 
environment is through regular 
Bible study. Moreover, the mind 
readily recurs to its habitual objects 
of thought. And it is these habitual 
objects which are certain to domi- 
nate the life. If we are habitually 
turning, thus, to the great moral 
and spiritual resources of the Scrip- 
ture, we have the right to count on 
a deepening spiritual life. 

Or, if we look at the matter from 
the point of view of personal associ- 
ation, the universal law to be recog- 
nized is that we become like those 
with whom we constantly are, to 
whom we voluntarily surrender our- 
selves, and who give themselves 
unreservedly to us. Now the Scrip- 
[124] 



TO TEACHERS 



ture offers us, in preeminent degree, 
just such association. It allows us 
to come into close personal contact 
with God-touched men, — those to 
whom and through whom God has 
most effectively spoken. We have 
here the opportunity of sharing their 
visions, and so of being introduced, 
through these greatest seers, into 
some of the deeps of the spiritual 
world. Here, too, in the Scripture 
is the record of the preeminent 
meetings of God with men, into 
which it is possible for us to enter. 

And the Scripture gives us, as 
does nothing else, the possibility of 
laying that foundation of a true per- 
sonal relation with God of which 
we have spoken. For it is a record 
of his dealings with men, and so of 
such a revelation of him as makes 
possible our answering trust. It 
[125] 



LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

calls out again and again our self- 
surrender in particulars. And it 
brings us in its atmosphere into 
some community of interest with 
God in Christ. As we thus give 
time to our Bible study, we are 
entering into the transforming asso- 
ciation with God, which must be 
the main factor in deepening our 
acquaintance with him ; and to 
come really to know God is life 
eternal. 

In my next letter I want to call 
your attention to some other impor- 
tant conditions of deepening still 
further this friendship with God. 



[126] 



LETTER IX 

THE CONDITIONS OF DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE WITH GOD 

{Continued) 



Letter Nine 

THE CONDITIONS OF DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE WITH GOD 

{Continued^ 

TN this letter I wish to call your 
-*■ attention to a single great funda- 
mental means, if our acquaintance 
with God is to deepen as it ought. 
The principle — and to it I wish to 
devote the entire letter — is simply 
this : that if our relation to God is 
to grow in significance, it needs 
expression. It is one of the central 
propositions of modern psychology, 
that in body and mind we are made 
for action, for the expression in some 
active way of every bodily and men- 
tal state. No idea or feeling or 

9 [129] 



LETTERS 

purpose can come to its full signifi- 
cance for any of us without expres- 
sion. The general psychological 
law here is, that that which is not 
expressed dies. Let us apply just this 
law, now, with some real care to our 
religious life. For if the law is a 
true one, we cannot expect full 
reality in our religious life if we fail 
to give careful heed to this principle 
of expression. If, therefore, one 
wishes his religious life to mean all 
possible to him, he must express it 
in significant action. Otherwise, it 
is likely to become either the senti- 
mentality of mere passive emotion, 
or only the dogmatic holding of cer- 
tain opinions. The need of expression 
is a perpetual one everywhere. So 
in any friendship, if you would have 
your love mean much, you must in 
various ways give it expression. 
[ 130] 



TO TEACHERS 



I. Expressio?i by Word. Many 
of us are naturally reserved, and are 
chary and half ashamed to express 
the best in us ; and repression in any 
personal relation is likely to grow 
on one apace. Any friendship needs, 
at times at least, expression in word. 
It is not only well for others that 
they should know occasionally the 
pleasure we find in their companion- 
ship, it is important for ourselves. 
And our relation to Christ certainly 
will not be to us what it ought unless 
we take some pains to say, in dif- 
ferent, simple, and perhaps largely 
private ways, what Christ means to 
us. We are not to underestimate 
here the value of simple witness. 
Christ's program for the conquest 
of the world was through a campaign 
of simple testimony from heart to 
heart of what Christ meant. Many 
[131] 



LETTERS 



of our closest personal relations suffer 
from lack of this simple expression 
in word. And we need not think 
it strange that the same principle 
should hold in the religious life. 
Does any one know how much 
Christ really means to you, not 
simply from some half formal ex- 
pression in prayer-meeting, but from 
the speaking out of your heart in 
close and intimate fellowship with 
another ? Are you taking pains that 
others shall know ? Do you really 
mean to be able, here, to speak with 
authority from first-hand knowledge 
out of your own experience ? You 
can only bear witness, but you are 
to bear witness of what Christ really, 
honestly is to you. How else shall 
others find him much to them ? It 
is so preeminently that the king- 
dom of God must grow. And it is 
[ 132] 



TO TEACHERS 



so, also, that your own sense of per- 
sonal relation to God will grow. 

2. Seeking to Please in Little 
Things, And friendship needs as 
well not only the witness of the 
word, but that expression that is 
found in seeking to please one's 
friend in little things. Perhaps the 
best test of a true love is to be found 
just here. For few of us are likely 
to fail in the great demands that our 
personal relations make upon us. 
But we are much more likely to fail 
in the thousand and one little ways 
in which the real spirit of our rela- 
tion to another is tested. The chief 
mark of obedience is not shown at 
the great crises, but is found rather 
in that sensitiveness of conscience 
that makes us careful to do what is 
well pleasing to God, even in the 
slighter things. The cup of cold 
[133] 



LETTERS 



water given in the name of a disciple, 
Christ assures us, is taken as given 
directly to him. And if one finds, 
in a personal relation, that he is 
always having his own way, however 
smoothly and graciously that may 
seem to be occurring, he may well 
suspect that he is guilty of real sel- 
fishness. And this same spirit is 
likely to pursue him in that most 
fundamental relation — the relation 
in which he stands to God in Jesus 
Christ. This expression of one's 
love in little things requires time, 
attention, and thoughtfulness. If we 
are really to minister in Christ's 
name, and to minister unto others 
as unto Christ, we shall hardly suc- 
ceed without the sympathy that is 
free from preoccupation and able to 
put itself in the other's place. A 
reverent love for another shows itself 
[134] 



TO TEACHERS 



in trifles of manner. And our love 
to Christ will best show itself in 
similar care in the trifles of our daily- 
life. We make no sacrifice so great 
as that which manifests itself in what 
we count the small things of daily- 
living. 

" More careful not to serve Thee much, 
But please Thee perfectly." 

3. By Gratitude, And true love 
needs especially that expression which 
finds its outlet in gratitude. Grati- 
tude has rare power to bring men 
together. It is hardly possible for 
any one to say honestly to another 
how much what the other has said 
or done or been, means to him, 
without a distinct strengthening of 
the ties between the two lives. The 
honest expression of gratitude brings 
men together as few things do. On 
[135] 



LETTERS 



the other hand, thoughtless ingrati- 
tude chills greatly any friendship. 
Even where there is no desire to 
cherish resentment, the person to 
whom the gratitude is due cannot 
avoid a feeling of real hurt. There 
are few things harder to bear, per- 
haps, in our daily life with others 
than to feel that the sacrifices that 
have cost us most have been all un- 
appreciated and taken practically as 
mere matters of course. Do we 
always appreciate the loneliness of 
those who stand nearest us ? And 
are we not too chary of the word of 
appreciation and of praise that might 
mean much more than we think ? 
It is not well in any personal relation 
that too much should be perpetually 
taken for granted. And so in our 
relation to God, we shall find few 
things so kindling our hearts and so 
[136] 



TO TEACHERS 



helping to make real the relation in 
which we stand to God, as to go 
carefully over the manifold occasions 
for thanksgiving, and to take pains 
to express our gratitude to the heav- 
enly Father for the mercies of the 
daily life. There are very few 
hearts that will not respond to a 
careful review of the occasions for 
thanksgiving. " In everything give 
thanks," the Apostle writes to the 
Thessalonians, "for this is the will 
of God in Christ Jesus to you-ward." 
And this single injunction strikes 
much closer to the very heart of our 
religious life than we often think. 

4. By Sharing Burdens. How 
close are the companionships which 
grow up in the mutual sharing 
of trial and struggle and danger ! 
This, I suppose, is what makes so 
significant the companionship of 
[ 137 ] 



LETTERS 



soldiers who have been long together 
in successive campaigns. The bur- 
dens that we share inevitably tend 
to draw our souls together. And 
it is just at this point that people 
sometimes make serious mistakes — 
parents in trying to spare their chil- 
dren, the husband the wife, the 
friend his friend. For, to refuse to 
let your close friend into your inner 
struggle and burden means often 
simply keeping him out of the deep- 
est part of your life, treating him 
like a child. This is not to spare 
him so much as to defraud him. 
And it is one of the highest honors 
conferred upon us by Christ that he 
does not deal with us in this way. 
Rather, he calls us into the sharing 
of his own suffering ; and he says to 
his immediate disciples, " Ye are they 
that have continued with me in my 
[138] 



TO TEACHERS 



temptations/' From this point of 
view, too, therefore, we may well 
say with Peter, " Insomuch as ye 
are partakers of Christ's sufferings, 
rejoice.'' That two souls should 
commit themselves with all the 
power of completest self-devotion 
in sacrifice to the same great cause, 
is to insure essential closeness of 
fellowship. And it is this fellow- 
ship that Christ offers us with him- 
self. And just as it is often only in 
the times of peculiar burden and 
trial that the best and greatest and 
deepest in our friends reveals itself, 
so, too, it must often be that only 
at such times shall we taste the full 
meaning of the heavenly Father's 
love and care. And in that mutual- 
ness which belongs to every great 
friendship, Christ not only shares his 
great purposes and sacrifices with us, 
[ 139 ] 



LETTERS 

but he asks us, in like manner, to 
bring to him all our burdens, to find 
them lightened for us in the thought 
of his sympathy and uplift. 

5. By Sacrifice, And this leads 
us to see distinctly that no love can 
mean most to us for which we have 
not genuinely sacrificed. A love 
that has cost us nothing is not likely 
to mean much in the beginning, nor 
to grow to much in the end. It is 
true that where the love is great and 
strong, the sacrifice will be a joy, 
rather than a sorrow. But some 
deep and significant giving of one- 
self there must be in any personal 
relation that is to greatly count. 
Sacrifices increase love. Our hearts 
are where our treasure is. Where 
we have invested little, we shall care 
little. And one need not be sur- 
prised to find that his Christian life 
[ 140 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



means little to him, if he has not 
been willing to render to Christ the 
sacrifice of time, of thought, of 
attention, of giving, of sacrifice that 
should really mean something in 
helping to bring to its goal that great 
kingdom of God that is to satisfy 
the longing heart of our Lord. In 
our selfishness it is sometimes diffi- 
cult for us to understand it ; but the 
whole religion of Christ is based on 
the fundamental principle that our 
highest joy can be found only in this 
positive giving of ourselves unto men 
and unto God in redemptive service, 
so entering into the very heart of 
Christ's own life and joy and peace. 
Such expression of our personal 
friendship with God, by the witness- 
ing word, by seeking to please in 
little things, by gratitude, by sharing 
burdens, by sacrifice, will as certainly 
[ HI ] 



LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

deepen our friendship with God as 
these same things deepen our friend- 
ship with men, and both results are 
as certain as the existence of law in 
the world at all. May I hope that 
this thought will help to bring more 
unity and simplicity into the think- 
ing and the living both of yourselves 
and of your pupils ? 



[142] 



LETTER X 

THE CONDITIONS OF DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE WITH GOD 

{Continued^ 



LjCtter Ten 

THE CONDITIONS OF DEEPENING 
ACQUAINTANCE WITH GOD 

(Continued) 

T SHALL not quite have brought 
^ out for you what seems to me 
to be the full force of this thought 
of the Christian life as a friendship 
with God, without calling your 
attention, in this letter, to three or 
four further considerations which 
affect any growing friendship. 

I. The Slight Causes of Diffi- 
culty. And, first, there are few 
cautions, probably, that the man 
who would be a true friend needs 
more to take to heart than the cau- 
tion to be on his guard against slight 
[ 145 ] 



LETTERS 



occasions of estrangement. In no 
personal relation that concerns us 
deeply can we safely harbor or dwell 
on the small points of controversy. 
Our only safety lies in clearing them 
up at once. Great estrangements 
grow from them. Both in our hu- 
man and our divine relations we are 
more in danger of getting away in 
the little than in the great things. 
The deeper the friendship one has 
with another the more sensitive one 
is to these little differences. One soon 
learns to interpret the slightest indica- 
tions of face or gesture or movement. 
And so in our relation to God, 
our progress is measured in part by 
our sensitiveness as to the little 
things. We need, for our high- 
est safety as well as for our joy, 
unclouded communion with the 
Father. Sensitive obedience in the 
[ 146 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



littles is both the proof of our love 
and God's way of guidance, and 
the direct road to more intimate 
acquaintance with God. On the 
other hand, disobedience in the little 
things constantly mars the relation. 
In all our close friendships it is 
also worth emphasis that we are not 
to look to and constantly dwell on little 
differences and faults in our friends. 
This faultfinding and complaining 
spirit is quite sufficient to spoil any 
love, even the deepest. This spirit 
kept up in relation to a child may 
easily end in " rooted antipathy '' 
on his part ; the bonds of sympathy 
are ruptured, and a spirit of entire 
discouragement results. By fixing 
your attention on defects, you can 
ruin a friendship that, on the other 
hand, is quite capable of becoming 
your chief joy. And a similar cau- 
[147] 



LETTERS 



tion is needed not less in our relation 
to God. It is quite possible to pick 
out of the allotment that has provi- 
dentially come to us the encouraging 
or the discouraging things, and so 
thankfully to rejoice, on the one 
hand, or bitterly to complain, on the 
other. The complaining spirit is 
often felt not to be a serious matter, 
but one has only to think how fatal 
are its results in other personal rela- 
tions to see how certainly it must 
disturb any deep sense of trust and 
love and gratitude, in our relation to 
God. This complaining spirit cuts 
the very root of a possible deepen- 
ing friendship with God, and is to 
be recognized, therefore, in all its 
seriousness as one of the deadliest 
enemies of a true and joyful and 
peaceful Christian life. It is not a 
small sin nor a small danger. 
[ 148 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



2. Sacred Respect for the Person- 
ality of Tour Friend. Perhaps the 
subtlest of all the conditions for 
deepening any true and worthy 
friendship is to be found in sacred 
respect for the personality of your 
friend. Where that is fundamen- 
tally lacking no great and worthy 
friendship can possibly result. And 
many a friendship has been greatly 
damaged by such a lack. There 
are limitations to all intimacies with 
others, and even in the closest friend- 
ships we are not to presume, we 
are not to pry, we are not to scold. 
We are not to take away the possi- 
bility of decision or choice, not even 
in the case of a child. We are not 
to insist on the explanation of every 
mood. Every soul must in much 
be alone, and ought to be. One 
only degrades his friendships, I have 
[ 149 ] 



LETTERS 

felt compelled often to say, when 
he measures them by the number 
of privacies that he rides over 
roughshod. 

And in our relation to God we 
are not to forget, upon his part, 
how marvelously he respects our 
freedom, and how, though he is 
Lord of all, he stands only without 
the door of our hearts to knock for 
admittance. God does not arbitra- 
rily obtrude or interfere. So truly 
does he respect our personality that 
he does not step in, even occasion- 
ally, to '* set things right." He 
has put us in no play world, but 
in a world in which our choice 
and our personality are fully re- 
spected. 

And, upon our own part, this 
spirit of reverence which is so neces- 
sary in our relation to our friends 
[ ^50] 



TO TEACHERS 



cannot be less necessary in our rela- 
tion to God. No friend can be to 
us what he might be without rever- 
ence both on his part and on ours. 
Still less can God give us his com- 
plete gift, if our reverence does not 
answer to his reverential treatment 
of us. Reverence is, indeed, not a 
formal matter of any kind of con- 
duct or of respect for places and 
things ; and a deep, inner rever- 
ence may quite conceivably exist 
where the outward conduct might 
seem to the careless observer irrev- 
erent. But if it is in any degree 
true, as it has been frequently 
charged of late, that the present 
generation is growing in irrever- 
ence, let us make it quite clear to 
ourselves that we are, in just that 
degree, striking at the very root of 
all true personal relations to God or 
[151] 



LETTERS 



men. The attitude of presumption, 
of prying, of scolding, of dictation 
must be far removed from our rela- 
tion to God. There is a false bold- 
ness, as Luther remarked, which 
talks to God as a man might talk to 
a " cobbler's lad." It is not for us 
to demand the time or the manner 
of God's revelation. " The secret 
of the Lord is with them that fear 
him." And if even our smallest 
human spirit has its holy of holies 
that may not be inconsiderately 
violated, how much more must 
deep reverence characterize all our 
thought of God ! We are to " work 
out our own salvation with fear and 
trembling ; for it is God who work- 
eth in us both to will and to work, 
for his good pleasure." It was not 
by accident that the great prayer that 
was to, characterize the disciples of 
[152] 



TO TEACHERS 



Christ in all ages began with the 
word, " Hallowed/' 

3. Be Real. Once more, no 
friendship is safe into which the 
element of pretense is introduced. 
We are to be real only and always. 
There are to be no false assertions, 
and no forced feeling. We are not 
to start or continue on a false basis. 
While, as I have said, we are not to 
question our love or that of another 
on slight occasions, we are still to be 
sure that we are scrupulously hon- 
est ; that we say what we mean, and 
only what we mean ; that the wit- 
ness we bear to Christ, though it be 
a modest witness, is just so far as it 
goes a genuinely honest one. In 
our prayers, too, we must learn how 
to tell the truth, not to take upon 
our lips expressions even of the 
Scriptures, which we cannot truth- 
[153] 



LETTERS 



fully transfer to our own experience. 
We are not even to repeat, out of 
our previous lives, expressions not 
now real. We are to make sure, 
that is, throughout, that we do not 
introduce that element of pretense 
that always means finally a deadly 
sense of unreality. He who will 
not be real saps thereby all reality 
in his relation with God as well as 
in his relation with men. 

4. You May Deepen Tour Ac- 
quaintance with God through Seeing 
What Others Have Received from 
Him. If one thinks of a great, 
many-sided nature like that of Aris- 
totle, or Leibnitz, or Luther, or 
Shakespeare, he will realize at once 
that different sides of the nature 
will be revealed to different persons. 
And one comes into the completest 
understanding of such a nature only 
[ 154 ] 



TO TEACHERS 



through ghmpses of table-talk and 
letters and home life, and from 
knowing his intimate friends. In 
exactly the same way we can come 
to know God, even approximately, 
in his fulness only as we take 
account not only of our own per- 
sonal experience, but supplement it 
with the largeness of the experience 
of others as well. We need in all 
things constantly the correction of 
others. Our own view is necessa- 
rily partial, and has its own inevi- 
table narrow limitations. Much of 
the best that God has for us must 
come through others. And even in 
this deepest matter of our personal 
relation to God, we are not made 
independent one of another. God 
has some special, peculiar message 
to speak through each soul ; and he 
may speak as really to us through 
[ 155 ] 



LETTERS 



another's life, as in his own direct 
communion with us. This recog- 
nition of the constant need we all 
have of Christian fellowship empha- 
sizes, from another point of view, 
thus, the importance of the Bible, 
in which it may be said we are able 
to put ourselves in touch with the 
most intimate friends of God. We 
can here see what God has meant 
to others, and so supplement and 
broaden and deepen our own view. 
In this constant and wise use of 
fellowship with others, and in that 
objective expression of our religious 
life in service, of which I earlier 
spoke, you will be saved from the 
brooding subjectivity that might 
otherwise beset your Christian life. 
The thought of our Christian life as 
a personal relation with God does 
not shut us up to ourselves. The 
[156] 



TO TEACHERS 



relation to God is so absolute and 
infinite that we need and can bring 
to it all the help of the supplemen- 
tary experience of others. 

In insisting thus at length, as I 
have in these last four letters, upon 
the fundamental significance of the 
conception of the Christian life as 
the beginning and deepening of a 
friendship with God, I have simply 
been trying to place before you, in 
terms of the personal life and ex- 
perience you already know, those 
great, fundamental Christian doc- 
trines which have been so long 
discussed under the names ^' con- 
version,'' ** regeneration," '' sanctifi- 
cation,'' " baptism of the Spirit," 
and *' faith and works." I have 
intentionally tried to strip the dis- 
cussion of all these more or less 
technical terms, because I fear they 
[ 157 ] 



LETTERS TO TEACHERS 

have often served to hide rather 
than to reveal the real truth as it is 
in Christ. And I have tried, rather, 
to get back to what seems to me to 
be the central conception of Christ 
and of the New Testament, that 
the Christian life is simply that of 
a growing child of the heavenly 
Father, and to ask you to see, in 
some detail, just what that great 
central thought of Christ meant. 
I hope the attempt has not been 
without value for you who teach, 
and I hope still more that through 
you it may bring something more 
of light and blessing into the lives 
of those taught by you. I am sim- 
ply trying to hand on to you that 
one great fundamental thought that 
has, perhaps, meant more than any 
other to me. 

[158] 



LETTER XI 

THE FUNDAMENTAL TEMPTA- 
TIONS 



Letter Eleven 

THE FUNDAMENTAL TEMPTA- 
TIONS 

T^THEN one turns from the 
^ ^ conception of the Christian 
life as a deepening personal relation 
of a child with the heavenly Father, 
to ask still more practically just what 
this conception of Christ means in 
living, he will find himself confront- 
ing, just as Christ did, certain great 
fundamental temptations that under- 
lie, I think, all the temptations of 
life. And I have thought I could 
not serve you better in this letter 
than by trying to make clear just 
these always-present temptations. 

In his tremendous sense of son- 
ship, of mission, and of power, Christ 

II [ i6i ] 



LETTERS 

took to his temptations a threefold 
consciousness. The elements in this 
threefold consciousness, of power, of 
mission, and of sonship, were for 
Christ a divine call, to which he 
made answer : I must be worthy of 
the power granted ; I must be a 
consistent founder of a spiritual 
kingdom ; I must prove a true son. 
And one cannot be a consistent 
founder of a spiritual kingdom, it 
is to be noted, except upon three 
conditions : constant spiritual sensi- 
tiveness, undying faith in men, and 
refusal to seek relief in change of 
circumstances rather than in change 
of self. 

The temptations which are thus 
seen to underlie all the temptations 
of Christ, and the temptations of all 
men, are : the temptation to abuse 
of trust, the temptation to fall below 
[162] 



TO TEACHERS 



one's highest spiritual sensitiveness, 
the temptation to seek rehef in 
change of circumstances rather than 
in change of self, the temptation to 
disbelief in men, the temptation to 
distrust of God. Just these, I judge, 
are the temptations which confront 
every man in all that threatens his 
moral and spiritual life. For the 
elements of Christ's consciousness 
are in only less degree the elements 
of the consciousness of us all. 

I. The Temptation to Abuse of 
Trust, The temptation which 
Christ faced, to use the power, given 
him for the sake' of the kingdom, 
for personal relief, was fundamen- 
tally a temptation to abuse of his 
trust. He was forced to meet the 
question, Why should he not use his 
power for his own relief — why 
should he not turn the stones into 
[ ^63 ] 



LETTERS 



bread ? Why, again, should he not 
use his power in a marvelous exhi- 
bition of trust in God that would 
remove prejudice, get him a hearing, 
and win deep and respectful attention 
from the first ? Why, once more, 
might he not use his power to 
establish his rule — his own right- 
eous rule — even by force, forth- 
with ? Christ's answer to each form 
of the temptation is simply the 
insistence that his power is given 
him for the sake of the kingdom, 
not for his own relief, whether in 
greater personal comfort, in in- 
creased popularity, or in impatient 
use of force. My power, he seems 
with quiet energy to say, is no per- 
sonal perquisite of my own ; it must 
be held sacredly for the great ends 
for which it was given. 

And everywhere to-day the same 
[164] 



TO TEACHERS 



temptation presses upon us all — the 
ever-present, fundamental tempta- 
tion to the abuse of our trusts. In 
the use of the positions in which we 
have been placed, of the power 
involved, of the money we handle, 
of the opportunities presented — in 
all alike the power of this temptation 
is felt. It is hardly possible to take 
up a paper without seeing some 
illustration of the abuse of trust. 
Our generation needs a great revival 
of the simple sense of fidelity to our 
trusts. No one of us is likely to 
cultivate too sensitive a conscience 
concerning any power that has come 
into his possession. Let him ask 
himself how his power has come ? 
for what end it was given .? whether 
he is using it simply and solely for 
that end, or is making it, rather, a 
means for his own personal gain ? 
[165] 



LETTERS 

2. The Temptation to Fall Below 
One' s Highest Spiritual Sensitiveness. 
And the very illustrations which the 
life of the present day affords make 
it unmistakably clear that a large 
part of the gigantic abuse of trust is 
due to the simple lack of a fine sense 
of honor. It is exactly this lack that 
has made such abuse of trust possible. 
To see truly here and to take the 
perfectly honorable course, requires 
a delicate sensitiveness of conscience, 
undoubted singleness of vision. This 
was the only way of deliverance for 
Christ himself. He needed the 
clearest spiritual insight to see the 
meaning of his trust. The pathway 
both of the highest individual prog- 
ress and of the largest social service 
requires that we should be steadily 
sensitive to the very best vision that 
God has given, and to remain per- 
[i66] 



TO TEACHERS 



sistently true to it, and so to get 
the larger and the higher vision. 
All true life, it seems not too much 
to say, is included in this. The 
inmost secret of life is that one 
should be persistently at his best. 
On the other hand, the onset of evil 
most to be feared is not that of open 
and brazen sin, but the subtle, grad- 
ual deterioration that, like an insidi- 
ous disease, saps the very foundation 
of all possible character. Like " the 
damnation of Theron Ware," in 
Harold Frederic's powerful story of 
that name, it comes on us as a thief 
in the night, while we still think of 
ourselves as sleek and prosperous. 
Plainly, a man has started on a de- 
scent, the extent of which, in its 
deep darkness, no eye can foresee, 
who consents to live in anything 
below his highest spiritual sensitive- 
[ 167 ] 



LETTERS 



ness. The temptation to do so is one 
of those fundamental temptations 
which carries with it a whole flood 
of others. 

3. The 'Temptation to Seek Relief 
in Change of Circumstances. When 
Christ was tempted to use the power 
given him for the founding of a 
spiritual kingdom for his own per- 
sonal relief, whether in greater 
comfort, or popularity, or sway, 
he was, in all three forms of the 
temptation alike, tempted to seek 
relief in change of circumstances, 
rather than in change of self, by 
proving adequate to the circum- 
stances. He could not -evade the 
real struggle involved in the setting 
up of such a kingdom, and his vic- 
tory must be inner, not outer. God 
means me to rule, he might well say, 
but not to establish my personal 
[168] 



TO TEACHERS 



power, but a spiritual rule. There 
is no escape, for either Christ or his 
disciple, except by changing those 
inner conditions which lie within 
our own power. 

The temptation to seek relief in 
change of circumstances rather than 
in change of self is perhaps peculiarly 
strong for Americans. The rapidity 
with which, in this newer country, 
great changes of fortune often take 
place, and the comparative ease with 
which a change of employment is 
made, constantly tempt the Ameri- 
can who does not find himself satis- 
fied to seek to change his conditions, 
rather than to adjust himself to his 
situation and prove himself superior 
to it. 

In any hard situation there are 
always two conceivable ways of 
deliverance : the one, that of simple 
[169] 



LETTERS 

escape from the circumstances ; the 
other, that of rising superior to the 
circumstances. No man who means 
to be a man can even wish always to 
take the easy way out. God's best 
and most gracious answer to our 
prayer for deliverance, as in Paul's 
case, may often be not the removal 
of the "thorn in the flesh," but the 
"sufficient grace." And if, in any 
given case, one finds it possible to 
take the easy way, he has still to 
remember that, so far as character or 
any other high attainment is con- 
cerned, he has all his fight still to 
make. From that real battle of life 
he may find no respite ; for the true 
sources of character, of influence, 
and of happiness alike, in this world 
of ours, are inner, not outer, — the 
riches of a cultured mind, the potent 
calm of a contented, self-controlled, 
[ 170] 



TO TEACHERS 



and lowly spirit, the wealth of a 
genuine love. These no change of 
circumstances can give. And they 
are ours all the more, if we have won 
them against the trend of circum- 
stances. Like Leonard, in Mrs. 
Ewing's ** The Story of a Short 
Life,'' we must learn to be " happy 
in our lot '' — to withstand the 
temptation to seek relief in change 
of circumstances rather than in 
change of self. 

4. 'The Temptation to Disbelief in 
Men, From the point of view of 
his work, the wilderness experience 
of Christ involved a further con- 
stant and fundamental temptation — 
the temptation to disbelief in men. 
For all three forms of Christ's temp- 
tation urge the advisability of begin- 
ning with men with a lower appeal 
— ' the appeal to their bodily needs, 
[171] 



LETTERS 



to their love of the marvelous, to 
their sense of fear. And in repudi- 
ating wholly the primary claim of 
any of these lower appeals, Christ 
affirms his deep faith in men. And 
the tempter's argument is still often 
pressed. No real kingdom of God, 
many of our modern theories seem 
to affirm, can be built on men. 
You can trust no heroic appeal, 
no appeal to love. 

Contrast, now, Christ's indomi- 
table faith in men. He knows 
well that you cannot essentially 
traduce men without traducing 
God. The suspicious attitude is 
one always at war with love. Dis- 
belief in men, the cynical spirit, is 
fatal alike to character, to influence, 
and to happiness, — to character, 
for you cannot greatly love him in 
whose greatness you have no real 
[172] 



TO TEACHERS 



belief; to influence, for you cannot 
strongly move those in whom your 
faith is small; to happiness, because 
in this narrowing, belittling judg- 
ment of men you have necessarily 
cut yourself off from the joy of 
worthy association. Suspicion ties 
your hands. It takes the heart out 
of your work, and the heart out 
of your joy. You must believe in 
men. 

5. The Temptation to Distrust of 
God. When one believes that there 
is no possibility of using effectively 
with men purely moral and spiritual 
forces, he disbelieves not only in 
men, but he shows an even deeper 
distrust of their Creator, God. 
This spirit, carried to its logical 
extent, means nothing short of 
atheism and the denial of all ideals. 
Even a few men with such thorough- 
[ 173 ] 



LETTERS 



going distrust of spiritual forces are 
able to diffuse a deadly atmosphere. 
The man who means with Christ 
to be a consistent builder of a spirit- 
ual kingdom must be willing to use 
the highest means and trust the 
results with God. We were not 
meant to be self-sufficient even as to 
men ; still less as to God. We need 
men, we need God ; we are all but 
fragments else. Life becomes pos- 
sible, joyful, and triumphant in pro- 
portion to the depth of our faith in 
God. 

And you teachers have a special 
right to urge with your pupils that 
they stand with Christ from the 
beginning of their lives against 
these constant and fundamental 
temptations that make a particularly 
strong appeal to the young. Christ 
seems to me to have shared with us 
[ 174] 



TO TEACHERS 



all this sacred story of his tempta- 
tions, just because he knew that we 
all had the same fight to make. 
We can do nothing better for men 
than to help them to the spirit that 
can rise above these fundamental 
temptations; and that is exactly 
the spirit of a true son of the 
Father. 



[ 175] 



LETTER XII 

THE SUPREME CLAIMS OF 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE UPON 
THOUGHTFUL MEN 



L,etter Twelve 

THE SUPREME CLAIMS OF 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE UPON 
THOUGHTFUL MEN 

TN this last letter which I am to 
"■- write to you concerning the 
great fundamental Christian truths, 
let me ask you to see, both for your- 
selves and for your pupils, in a kind 
of summary way, and in the light 
of all our previous discussion, the 
supreme claims of the Christian life 
upon thoughtful men. You will not 
be in doubt as to what I mean by 
the Christian life. It is the life of 
the man who intends to be first and 
foremost a disciple of Jesus Christ, 
[ 179] 



LETTERS 

to live the loving life of a true child 
of the heavenly Father. And I 
mean by the thoughtful man the 
man who is in earnest to see things 
in their true proportions, for whom 
the great is really great, and for 
whom the little takes its appropriate 
smaller place. You can hardly find 
the inspiration you must need for 
your work as teachers, unless you are 
thoroughly convinced of the su- 
premacy of the claims of the life you 
are urging upon your pupils. And 
the lines of thought already covered 
ought to make clear to you how 
great the Christian life is in its pres- 
ent contribution, and how immeas- 
urable is its outlook upon the future. 
Let us try to make clear to ourselves, 
then, the supreme claims of the 
Christian life, looking at the matter 
from different points of view, and 
[i8o] 



TO TEACHERS 



putting it in different forms, not all 
mutually exclusive. 

I. And, first, the Christian life is 
the supreme prudence^ using the word 
not in any low sense of mere pru- 
dential selfishness, but in the larger 
sense of that practical wisdom that 
takes the long look ahead, that takes 
in the whole of life, age and death 
and eternity. In Professor James' 
words, " In all ages the man whose 
determinations are swayed by refer- 
ence to the most distant ends has 
been held to possess the highest intel- 
ligence. The tramp who lives from 
hour to hour ; the Bohemian whose 
engagements are from day to day ; 
the bachelor who builds but for a 
single life ; the father who acts for 
another generation ; the patriot who 
thinks of a whole community and 
many generations ; and, finally, the 
[i8i] 



LETTERS 

philosopher and saint whose cares are 
for humanity and for eternity, — 
these range themselves in an un- 
broken hierarchy/' The Christian 
life says with Browning's Rabbi : 

" Grow old along with me ! 
The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made : 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, ' A whole I planned. 
Youth shows but half j trust God: see all, nor 
be afraid !/ " 

The life of a disciple of Christ con- 
fronts a man, thus, with the constant 
question : Are you building on such 
lines as promise perpetual growth 
into the best things, even on into the 
eternities ; or, is your idea of life such 
that you must look back after a very 
few years with vain regret, saying, 
with the title of a poor play, " When 
we were twenty " ? For myself, I 
[182] 



TO TEACHERS 



do not see how it is possible for a 
man who really means to think, not 
to wish to take this long look ahead ; 
to be sure that he is building some- 
thing better than greater barns ; that 
the plan of his life is so adjusted to 
the great on-working forces of the 
universe, so bent on doing the will 
of God, that it is certain to " abide 
forever." And because the Christian 
life takes clearly into its vision the 
whole of life and destiny, it makes a 
supreme claim upon the thoughtful 
man. 

2. In the second place, the Chris- 
tian life is the one complete life that can 
face all the facts of life without flinch- 
ing and with genuine hope. It should 
be particularly characteristic of the 
thoughtful man that he wishes to see 
all the facts, to face them fully, and 
to face them just as they are. There 



LETTERS 

is the fact of our double nature, with 
both its heavenly and its earthly ap- 
peal. There is the fateful gift of 
will, with its power of choice either 
for God or against God. There is 
the fact of responsibility, of the con- 
stant influence that we are exerting 
one over another whether we will or 
not. There is the terrible fact of 
sin, an abiding fact, and if one's face 
is not in the right direction, a grow- 
ing fact. And there is the fact of 
death, the one certain event that 
awaits every man. I quite sympa- 
thize with the emphasis of the pres- 
ent generation upon right living as 
the best possible preparation for 
dying; and yet I cannot think it a 
wholly wise reaction that allows a 
man to leave out of account this great 
and certain fact. For myself, I want 
to be sure that all that God may have 
[184] 



TO TEACHERS 



for me in that experience of death I 
am prepared to take in. 

<•' I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and 

forbore 
And bade me creep past." 

And there is the fact of account- 
ability to God, to which Daniel 
Webster once solemnly bore testi- 
mony that it was the most important 
thought that ever occupied his mind. 
" So then each one of us shall give 
account of himself to God.'' And 
there is the fact of xh^ future life, in 
which at least this is certain, that 
every one of us must live with him- 
self. Now, all these facts, alike dark 
and difficult, inspiring and transform- 
ing, the Christian life seems to me 
to be able fully to face, as no other. 
It gives the disciple of Christ such a 
plan for his life as enables him to be 
sure that the hold of the godlike in 



[185] 



LETTERS 



his double nature shall strengthen 
with his years ; that his will shall 
will in line with the eternal and 
righteous purposes of God ; that he 
need not shrink from the thought of 
responsibility for others, nor even 
lose hope in the face of sin, nor be 
in bondage to the fear of death, nor 
doubt that it will be possible for him 
to face his final accountability to 
God in the same filial spirit in which 
he faces daily the Father's will, nor 
question that the sharing of God's 
life of self-sacrificing love here is 
inevitably of the very quality of the 
eternal life that is to be. How 
supreme a claim does that life make 
upon the thoughtful man, which is 
able with assurance and hope to face 
all these facts of life ! 

3. The Christian life, further, 
makes a supreme claim upon the 
[ 186 -J 



TO TEACHERS 



thoughtful man because it involves 
the one great world-organization for 
ideal aims ^ for ends of character. The 
Church of Christ, as the author of 
Ecce Homo long ago pointed out, is 
in very truth " the Moral University 
of the world — not merely the great- 
est, but the only great School of 
Virtue existing/' Have you thought 
what it really means for the ideal 
interests of the world that there 
should be such an organization as 
the Church of Christ, with its little 
groups of disciples, with whatever 
imperfections, still gathered every- 
where, not for selfish interests, but 
to bear witness in the community 
to the highest ideals, and to keep 
clear before men the vision of God 
and the spiritual world ? There is 
no other organization or institution, 
outside the family, that can be com- 
[187] 



LETTERS 

pared for a moment with the Church 
in profound moral significance, and 
in hope for the world. If the dy- 
namic problem of life is, as Profes- 
sor Everett used to say at Harvard, 
the problem of throwing one's life 
in with the great world movements, 
then surely no man who wishes to 
make his life count for the most can 
wisely stand outside of some par- 
ticipation in the Church of Christ. 
We boast that our generation has 
come to see more clearly than any 
preceding, that we are members one 
of another. It would seem to be the 
first inference from this social con- 
sciousness that we should not fail to 
see its truth for the highest interests 
of life. We are members one of 
another, not only for economic and 
political ends, but even more for the 
highest spiritual ends. And I do not 
[i88] 



TO TEACHERS 



see how any thoughtful man can feel 
justified in standing as a mere on- 
looker, when he is face to face with 
this one great world-organization for 
ideal aims, the Church of Christ. 

4. Again, the Christian life stands 
for the mightiest of all convictions , and 
in this, too, makes a supreme claim 
upon the thoughtful man. A man's 
real strength for all possible accom- 
plishment, other things being equal, 
we are never to forget, depends on 
his convictions. One of the great 
dangers of the educated man, just 
because he has learned to look at 
things from many points of view, is 
a kind of over-sophistication, that 
means that he has lost the sense of 
emphasis and selection among the 
facts of life, and therefore lost the 
great fundamental convictions that 
must underlie the highest living. If 
[ 189 ] 



LETTERS 

this has come to be true of a man, 
he is pretty certain to be worth 
positively less to the world after 
his university training than before. 
Now, the Christian life, in its very 
spirit, stands assuredly for the mighti- 
est of all convictions possible to men : 
for the love of God, and the life of love. 
In these great convictions root all 
others that are of prime importance 
to men, and these convictions carry 
with them the highest courage and 
the most unfaltering faith. No the- 
ory of life that has ever been pro- 
posed to men is able here to outbid 
the Christian life. 

5. T^he Christian life involves, too, 
the supreme and all-inclusive surrender, 
and thereby again makes a supreme 
claim upon every man who is willing 
to think. Even our ordinary psy- 
chology and ethical philosophy are 

[ 190] 



TO TEACHERS 



saying to-day that life is a paradox, 
that victory comes through self- 
surrender, that the measure of life is 
not its income, but its outgo, and 
that it is as one gives himself in the 
varied relations of life that he truly 
finds himself. It belongs, therefore, 
to the very drift of our times that 
we should recognize that not exclu- 
sion but inclusion enlarges life, and 
that the largest life can come only to 
the man who gives himself with 
increasing breadth and depth in 
family, community, nation, the king- 
dom of God. Now, the Christian 
life brings to its inevitable climax this 
attitude of surrender, for it calls for 
that supreme and all-inclusive surren- 
der that carries with it all that is best 
in all the lower stages ; for it is sur- 
render to the will of God. It says, 
therefore, with Christ, " I am come 
[191] 



LETTERS 



down from heaven, not to do mine 
own will, but the will of him that 
sent me." And beyond this the law 
of surrender cannot go, and in this 
one vital commitment of the life is 
included all and more than all that 
psychology and ethical philosophy 
contend for in the lower stages of 
the surrendered life. The Christian 
life stands here, therefore, for the 
richness and largeness of the "abun- 
dant life," over against the " abiding 
alone" that marks the life that re- 
fuses to give itself. 

6. It is to say the same thing 
in different words, perhaps, when, 
catching up the central thought of 
our preceding studies, I say that the 
Christian life makes also a supreme 
claim upon the thoughtful man 
because it stands for the relation which 
gives reality and meaning and value to 
[192] 



TO TEACHERS 



all other personal relations. We have 
seen in detail how surely, if life is 
the fulfilment of relations, the rela- 
tion to God is not simply one relation 
among others, but that one great, 
all-commanding relation which, truly 
fulfilled, carries with it a true fulfil- 
ment of every other. The anxi- 
ety which the Christian father, or 
mother, has that his child may be- 
come a disciple of Christ, arises from 
his conviction that in very fact the 
relation to God is that one essential 
relation which, itself set right, in- 
evitably sets all others right. The 
thoughtful man, therefore, feels just 
at this point, too, the supreme claim 
upon him of the Christian life. 

7. Or, if we look at the matter 
from a slightly different point of 
view, we may say, in the light of the 
most careful investigation of man's 

'3 [193] 



LETTERS 

nature, that life has, above all, its 
great sources in friendship and work, 
and that the supreme claim, there- 
fore, of the Christian life upon the 
thoughtful man, is to be seen pre- 
cisely in this, that in the acquaintance 
with God in the Spirit, it offers the 
one ideal association for both character 
and happiness^ and, at the same timCy 
calls to the highest work, the sharing 
of God's own redeeming activity, in 
his giving of himself to men. Just 
because the Christian life meets here, 
in the completest degree in which it 
is possible for us to conceive, the 
ideal conditions of the richest life, it 
makes here a supreme claim upon 
any mind that is willing to think 
long enough to see what those ideal 
conditions are. When God calls us 
to acquaintance with himself and to 
share in his own great work, he 
[ 194] 



TO TEACHERS 



makes it possible for us to give our 
lives to eternal interests and to the 
highest conceivable interests. Blessed 
is the man v^ho has found his work 
and the great Companion ! Heaven 
itself has nothing greater to offer. 
We can hardly doubt, therefore, as 
I have elsewhere said, that '' the two 
great centers of the life beyond must 
be association and work ; though we 
may not know the precise forms that 
these will take, nor how greatly both 
may deepen beyond our present con- 
ception. Steadily deepening personal 
relations, rooted in the one absolutely 
satisfying relation to God in Christ, 
there must be; and work, in which 
one may lose himself with joy, be- 
cause it is God's work. This, at least, 
the future will contain." 

8. All this means, further, that 
the Christian life makes a supreme 
[195] 



LETTERS 

claim upon the thoughtful man be- 
cause it gives assurance of the highest 
hopes. It contains within itself the 
vision of the ideal, the best our hearts 
can ask or imagine, and exceeding 
abundantly beyond all that we ask or 
think. At least occasional experi- 
ences in the personal relations of life 
may give one a hint of the riches 
here in store. To know something 
of the deep undercurrent of even one 
true friendship, with its contribution 
of calm and peace and hope and joy, 
is to get a suggestion of what this 
deepening life in the acquaintance 
and work of God may mean. Christ 
makes us able to believe in the 
immortal life, and in the endless 
growth into the life and work of 
love — into the deeper acquaintance 
with the inexhaustible God. And 
we build our hopes of all the future 
[ 196] 



TO TEACHERS 



life upon nothing so surely as upon 
Christ's own spirit and word. What 
other theory of life is able to give 
such assurance ? 

9. And all these claims of the 
Christian life upon thinking men 
are true, because, back of all, the 
Christian life means simply the full 
recognition of the one great world-fact 
and person^ fesus Christ. Above all, 
therefore, it is because the Christian 
life calls to the discipleship of the 
supremest personality of history ; 
because it brings us at once face to 
face with the vision of the matchless 
riches of that life ; because, there- 
fore, it gives the completest assur- 
ance for character and influence and 
happiness, and so opens up the way 
to the boundless growth and achieve- 
ment of the eternal future ; it is 
because of all this that above all it 
[197] 



LETTERS 



is in Christ that the Christian life 
makes its supreme and all-inclusive 
claim. 

With this survey of the supreme 
claims of the Christian life, and with 
its outlook into the eternal future, 
we have come to the end of the 
conference we have undertaken 
together. I almost feel as if I 
must have some personal acquain- 
tance with you. In any case, I 
have shared with you my best. May 
I hope that something of the great- 
ness of the calling with which you 
are called may have been brought 
home to you in our study together 
of these great themes of the Christian 
life ? If I have succeeded in accom- 
plishing at all what I originally set 
out to do, I shall have brought home 
to you, I trust, in some measure, the 
double conviction both of the great- 
[198] 



TO TEACHERS 



ness and of the simplicity of the faith 
in Christ. I shall have helped you, 
I hope, to a little deeper sense of the 
meaning of your work as teachers of 
the religion of Christ, and of the joy 
of his service. May the God of hope 
fill you with all joy and peace in 
believing. 



[ 199] 






J ^ 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 1 6066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



/3^ 



■vM 



m, 



^'V'> -^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 022 297 5 



V 

•'■S'i 



